Synchronous extensions to operation centric hardware description languages

Abstract

The abstract transition system (ATS) is a high-level hardware description framework. ATS's operation-centric abstraction permits perspicuous descriptions of complex concurrent hardware behavior as a sequence of atomic state transitions. However non-determinism in the ATS semantics prevents it from capturing the behavior of systems whose correctness depends upon both function and exact synchronous timing. To address this shortcoming, we present two extensions to ATS-committing transitions and synchronously delayed expressions-to support the specification of synchronous behaviors and interfaces. The new synchronous extensions compose naturally with the original ATS. We describe a compilation strategy for the synchronous extensions that leverages existing ATS synthesis capabilities. We also evaluate the new extensions' ease of description and synthesis quality in several design examples.