Peter Ashenden
Department of Computer Science, University of Adelaide, Australia
October 1998
The proposed research involves an investigation to devise language features for interface protocol description that integrate cleanly with VHDL and with other SUAVE extensions. The work will include a survey of existing techniques for specifying interface protocols in computer software and telecommunications domains, and design of language features based on the SUAVE extensions. Attention will be paid to ensuring that the semantics of the features support automatic synthesis of protocol implementation and verification of refinement.
ICL, as part of their SuperVise design methodology, has developed an extension of VHDL called VHDL+. The language includes support for describing interface protocols in terms of message sequences, and for refining messages into lower-level implementations. The language also supports a form of abstract concurrency. ICL has demonstrated that use of these language features can reduce design time and defect rate. However, the language extensions are not well defined, and do not integrate well with existing language features. This complicates the language, and makes formal analysis and refinement difficult. Furthermore, the semantics of language features for message passing and concurrency are biased toward hardware implementation, making the language less suitable for the early stages of the hardware/software co-design process.
The proposed research involves an investigation to devise more suitable language features for interface protocol description that integrate cleanly with the base language and with other SUAVE extensions. The work will include a survey of existing techniques for specifying interface protocols in computer software and telecommunications domains, and design of language features based on the SUAVE extensions. Attention will be paid to ensuring that the semantics of the features support automatic synthesis of protocol implementation and verification of refinement.
This work will be undertaken as part of the SUAVE project. Funding of approximately
$AU24,000 per annum for a Postgraduate Scholarship will be requested for this project as part
of a proposal to the ARC Large Grants Scheme for 2000-2002.
Peter Ashenden
Dept. Computer Science, University of Adelaide, SA 5005, Australia
Phone: +61 8 8303 4477
Fax: +61 8 8303 4366
Email: petera@cs.adelaide.edu.au