Specification, Simulation and Automated Design of Interfaces and Digital Circuits.
Abstract
This report describes research done in hardware description, simulation, and design automation. Although the basic thrust of the work has been aimed at I/O and interface problems, most of the results are more general. The efforts in formal hardware description have produced a language for bus, I/O and interface specification, GLIDE. GLIDE is supported by a compiler which performs syntactic and semantic checks. A translator to the ISPL language has also been written. The resulting code and non-translatable GLIDE semantics forced abandonment of ISPL either directly or indirectly from GLIDE for I/O description. The major research reported here is design automation work. This grant has supported synthesis research - the mapping from a functional description of the system (ISP) to be designed to the structure. Automated design of the control circuitry is in the early stages, but a working program designs the data paths, registers and memories. An early design the program produced came within 25% of the cost of the design a human designer produced. The PDP-8/E design, included here, has a chip count within 50% of that commercial design, but the design program produced an entirely different design.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jul 31, 1978
- Accession Number
- ADA059708
Entities
People
- Alice C. Parker
Organizations
- Carnegie Mellon University