Challenges in design-oriented modeling in biology

Research and development in life sciences domain brings every day many innovations. Some of them have been enabled (or improved) by the micro-electronics. Several examples are described in this paper. A big challenge in the design of such systems is that the biological part cannot be uncoupled from the rest of the system during the design process. The integration of biological parts in system's design workflow is a bottleneck which can be as penalizing as the technological aspects themselves. In this context, the development of design-oriented models of biological systems would be major step forward. The extension of conventional CAD tools used for microelectronics to biology is a promising way to tackle this issue. In particular, a new formalism has been established for the modeling of complex biological networks with Hardware Description Languages, such as VHDL-AMS.