Transactors for parallel hardware and software co-design

Abstract

The use of higher-level design specifications is required for large scale embedded systems, yet these must admit efficient hardware and software implementations. The transactor model separates local computation from global communication, and avoids overspecifying the execution of computations within each unit. The use of guarded atomic commands provides a clean model for concurrent activities that share state within each unit, and supports computations on non-deterministic input streams.