Rapid prototyping of embedded software using selective formalism

Abstract

Our software synthesis tool, CSP++, generates C++ source code from verifiable CSPm specifications, and includes a framework for runtime execution. Our technique of selective formalism allows the synthesized formal control backbone code to be linked with non-formal user-coded C++ functions that carry out I/O and data processing. This tool already facilitates rapid prototyping of formally-specified software by bypassing the customary manual translation from a formal notation. In this work, we extend the rapid prototyping capability to SOPC (system on programmable chip) by targeting the CSP++ execution framework to an FPGA processor core. This is demonstrated with a new point-of-sale case study.