Specification partitioning for system design

Abstract

Behavioral partitioning can be applied to attain various goals, one of which is the satisfaction of chip-packaging constraints. Such partitioning heavily influences decisions made in subsequent structural design, and may therefore lead to higher performance designs and more eficient use of area and pins than possible when structure is designed before partitioning. Current behavioral partitioning approaches are limited in that they partition at the level of control/dataflow graph operations. We introduce a new approach which partitions entire computations of a behavioral specification, such as processes and procedures, into chip behavioral specifications. We demonstrate the approach 's usefulness and highlight results of several examples.

Protocol generation for communication channels

“…Interface synthesis presented in this paper has been been implemented and integrated with the systemlevel partitioner presented in [1]. The partitioner groups the variables, behaviors and channels in a system specication into memories, modules, and buses respectively.…”

“…A c hannel is an abstract communication medium over which two processes can transfer data. System partitioning [1] m a y group processes and variables in the system specication into modules. The set of tasks which are performed to implement communication between the modules in a system are collectively dened as Interface Synthesis.…”

Design of Embedded Systems: Formal Models, Validation, and Synthesis

“…Few papers have been published on automating the design of, say, a memory hierarchy or an I/O subsystem based on standard components. Notable exceptions to this rule are papers dealing with retargetable compilation (e.g., Theissinger et al [TSV94]), or with a very abstract formulation of partitioning for co-design (e.g., Kumar et al [KAJW92,KAJW93], Prakash and Parker [PP91], and Vahid and Gajski [VG92]). The structure of the application-specific hardware components, on the other hand, is generally much less constrained.…”

“…Vahid, Gajski et al [VG92,GNRV96] perform graph-based partitioning of a variable-grained specification. The specification language is SpecCharts, a hierarchical model in which the leaves are "states" of a hierarchical Statecharts-like finite state machine.…”

SLIF: a specification-level intermediate format for system design

“…The need for coarse-grained procedural-level partitioning was stressed in [2], as well as in [3,4]. Approaches in [5,6,7] partition at the ner-grained statement level (or statement sequence).…”