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Powertrain controller design is among the most challenging problems due to the complexity of the functions that the system has to support, to the safety aspects and to the cost limits imposed by car manufacturers. To compound these difficulties, time-to-market requirements are becoming more and more stringent. Design time, continuously changing specifications and safety considerations have pushed the design more and more towards software implementation of the main functionality. Software has been traditionally designed with very little abstraction in mind thus forcing a tight dependency of the implementation on the particular hardware architecture, e.g., the instruction set of the micro- controller. Software legacy has made the rapid adoption of new technology and IC's almost impossible, stifling innovation. In addition, the absence of a correct abstraction hierarchy made verifying the correctness of the behavior of the system as well as adding new functionality extremely difficult.