Levels of Abstraction Architectural Level

• Behavioral domain

  • Set of performance specifications
  • Gross operation characteristics

• Structural domain

  • Processors, memory units, device controllers, etc. communicating via ports or buses

• Physical domain

  • High-level physical partitioning, such as chip or cabinet level

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Behavioral domain concerned with manipulation of data and storing results without concern for details of how.

Structural description is often largest component at this level, perhaps because of a lack of formal methods of describing behavior.