Abstract.
Competent design of hardware/software systems needs the convergence of three concurrent research directions: the study of hierarchy types, the intelligent communication between different domains, the formal verification/ test. We extend the theory of hierarchy types to integrate communication properties as well as correctness and testability, to suit the behavioral specification of todays complex system design. The high level approach of these problems permits the intervention of an intelligent agent to adapt techniques, models or
methods to the particular design. The agent can be a designer, assisted by man-machine dialog interface, or an intelligent system. Testability measures the difficulty of test; it is used in this paper to emphasize the high-level strategy. Design-for-testability techniques applied to different models increase the fault coverage and reduce the test generation time. Modification of the system's specification to improve testability performed at higher levels of the design hierarchy reduces the complexity of their generation/ application. We propose a behavioral adaptable DFT technique. Behavior of the complex system under design is specified initially, representing the highest level of the construction hierarchy, in a high-level description language. This also contributes to DFT for hardware-software systems.