Specification and Synthesis of Exception Handling in Grammar-based Hardware Synthesis
Johnny Oerg, Anshul Kumar, Ahmed Hemani, Shashi Kumar · Journal of Electrical Engineering and Information Science · 1998
ProGram is a grammar based specification language aimed for specification of protocols, interfaces and control dominated functionality. Specification of exception handling functionality and its automatic implementation are key requirements for a robust design methodology. We have extended ProGram to include specification of a wide range of exception handling functionality: reset, to deal with exception handling needs of global nature; interrupt, for representing exception handling on a hierarchical basis; and error sequences, to handle situations when inputs are not according to the specified grammar. We have also enhanced our synthesis algorithms and relieved them from some earlier limitations, to allow the ProGram compiler to deal with the exception handling extensions to the ProGram language. The tool based on these techniques has been used for the implementation of 1) a send/receive protocol supplied by industry, 2) a bus-arbiter and 3) the Intel 8251A Personal Communication Interface.