Improved Controller Synthesis from Esterel
Cristian Soviani, Jia Zeng, Stephen A. Edwards · 2004
We present a new procedure for automatically synthesizing controllers from high-level Esterel specifications. Unlike existing \textsc{rtl} synthesis approaches, this approach frees the designer from tedious bit-level state encoding and certain types of inter-machine communication. Experimental results suggest that even with a fairly primitive state assignment heuristic, our compiler consistently produces smaller, slightly faster circuits that the existing Esterel compiler. We mainly attribute this to a different style of distributing state bits throughout the circuit. Initial results are encouraging, but some hand-optimized encodings suggest room for a better state assignment algorithm. We are confident that such improvements will make our technique even more practical.