Abstract
Decomposition of system behavior along functional boundaries into interacting sequential components is a key step in top‐down system design. In this paper, we present sequential decomposition, a method for factoring sequential components from a system specification based on interface specifications of the components. The resulting components can be independently synthesized, or realized using off‐the‐shelf components. We introduce interface specification language (ISL), based on finite‐state machine semantics, to specify the input/output behavior of synchronous sub‐systems. A component is factored from a system by embedding an implementation of the complement of its interface into the system description. The composition of a machine with its complement is shown to be isomorphic to the machine, and the composition of a machine with an implementation of its component is shown to be a safe interaction. We apply sequential decomposition to a non‐trivial example, a special‐purpose computer with Scheme programming language primitives as its instructions.
Highlights
INTRODUCTIONEcomposition of system specifications for computer-aided system design is an active topic in synthesis research
Decomposition of system behavior along functional boundaries into interacting sequential components is a key step in top-down system design
As a generalization of system factorization, we have developed sequential decomposition which uses a finite state machine model to decompose system descriptions into interacting sequential machines [3, 4]
Summary
Ecomposition of system specifications for computer-aided system design is an active topic in synthesis research. A design tool should have the flexibility to let a designer decompose a system into suitable components with explicit synchronization and value communication. Synthesis of these decomposed components with register transfer level specifications can be accomplished by high-level synthesis techniques. We introduce Interface specification language (ISL), to describe the interaction of a machine with its environment, orthogonal to its functional behavior. It is shown that a machine composed with an implementation of its complement results in a safe interaction, meaning that the machines can complete an interaction protocol and reach their respective final states
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