HOP: (Hardware Viewed as Objects and Processes) A Process Model for Synchronous Hardware Semantics, and Experiments in Process Composition

摘要

The authors present a language Hardware viewed as Objects and Processes (HOP) for specifying the structure, behavior, and timing of hardware systems. HOP embodies a simple process model for lock-step synchronous processes. An absproc specification written in HOP describes the externally observable behavior of a process. A collection of absprocs may be composed to form a larger process, using parallel composition, renaming, and hiding. This paper presents the communication primitives of HOP, illustrate HOP through several examples, and then present its operational semantics. Then we present the role played by HOP in three VLSI design activities: (i) inferring concise behavioral descriptions of systems from their structural descriptions; (ii) static detection of control timing errors during behavioral inference; (iii) productive and runtime efficient functional simulation using the inferred behavior. (KR)