Specification and refinement in system design
Sanjiv M. Narayan · 1994
As methodologies and tools for chip-level design mature, design effort becomes focused on increasingly higher levels of abstraction. We present, in this dissertation, three design tasks that must be an integral part of any system-design methodology. First, system-level specification issues are discussed and an executable language, SpecCharts, is presented for specification of embedded systems. Second, to satisfy system design constraints, the designer will partition the set of functional objects in the specification such as variables, computations and communication channels into a set of well-defined system components such as memories, chips and buses. In order to enable the designer to select from several design alternatives, we define the set of quality metrics that characterize designs at the system level. Methods to estimate these metrics are described. Third, once the functional objects have been mapped to system components, the specification needs to be updated to reflect the decisions made by the designer during system partitioning. We present the various refinement tasks that need to be performed in order to obtain simulatable and synthesizable descriptions of the system components. The methods presented in this dissertation are validated by conducting experiments on several examples.