The main objectives of the ENOSYS project are to shorten time to market and to reduce design costs in the development of new electronic products. This is of prime importance to European companies seeking to increase their share of the competitive consumer electronics market, where the flexibility to move quickly to add distinguishing features, such as faster operation, lower power consumption or miniaturization, is paramount. ENOSYS will achieve this by allowing designers to work at a high level of abstraction and removing the need to concentrate on the time-consuming details of the design.

ENOSYS proposes a seamless tool flow for embedded systems modelling and synthesis and addresses the integration and enhancement of existing tools from European SME vendors (Softeam and Axilica) to build a common extendable design environment. This will be delivered through:

• (a) the development of novel approaches for embedded system specification on different abstraction layers;
• (b) the development of efficient techniques for the automatic exploration of the hardware/software design space;
• and (c) the automatic synthesis of efficient descriptions for both hardware (synthesizable HDL) and embedded software (C/C++) components of the targeted system from models based on the UML MARTE profile.

To evaluate and to bring the proposed concepts to industrial realization, ENOSYS will perform two complementary case studies (INTRACOM Telecom and THALES Communications) covering the communication and multimedia markets representative of future systems complexity. Loughborough University and the University of Peloponnese will deliver important new enhancements to the tool flow to improve performance and general applicability.

Through active participation in OMG standardization activities, results will be exploited both during the project and will persist long after completion. The partners will have the opportunity to transfer their actual design needs, stemming from real world cases studies in highly demanding application areas to emerging standards.