Grammar-based hardware synthesis from port-size independentspecifications

摘要

A protocol defines how systems communicate. There are two ways ofnspecifying the protocol, the language of communication. One way is tonspecify the automaton that recognizes the language, and this is thenapproach taken by SDL, etc. The other more abstract way ss to specifynthe grammar of the language and let a tool synthesize the automaton.nDirectly specifying the automaton makes the specification implementationndependent in two ways: the time behavior is specified in terms ofnstates, and the width of the inputs and outputs is fixed. By specifyingnthe grammar, the specification is potentially independent of both thesenimplementation details and allows design space exploration in thesendimensions. This paper presents a grammar-based language, callednProgram, that supports a port-size independent specificationsnmethodology and its application to parts of the Operation andnMaintenance protocol, a typical application from the ATM world. Thenmethodology has also been applied to another test set of example designsnand compared to standard RTL synthesis and HLS in order to evaluate thenquality of the produced designs