Application of the object-oriented principles for hardware and embedded system design

As the complexity of hardware (HW) and embedded system design is constantly increasing, the researchers are seeking to develop new more abstract and productive design methods or adapt the existing ones from other domains such as software design. This paper addresses the problem of using the object-oriented (OO) design techniques in HW domain. The main OO design techniques are as follows: abstraction, separation of concerns, composition and generalization. The application of the OO design paradigm has many aspects: highlevel specification of HW models using OO formal notations such as Petri Nets and UML diagrams, HW description using OO HW description languages such as VHDL extensions and SystemC, HW design using OO HW architectures, platforms and design patterns. In this paper, we present a comprehensive overview of the application of the OO design paradigm in HW and embedded system design domains and formulate its main principles, discuss the current achievements in the area, and outline the future trends.