MICROELECTRONIC SYSTEMS NEWS




FILENUMBER: 5010
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Text Formal Approach Hardware Design Staunstrup
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DATE: january 1994
TITLE: Text on Formal Approach to Hardware Design by Staunstrup

Text on Formal Approach to Hardware Design by Staunstrup

(Contributed by J. Staunstrup of Technical Univ. of Denmark)

A  FORMAL  APPROACH  TO  HARDWARE  DESIGN

J. Staunstrup
Department of Computer Science
Technical University of Denmark
Lyngby, Denmark

The contents is summarized below, a more complete description can be obtained
by anonymous ftp at the sites: world.std.com / ftp.wkap.nl (directory books)
or ftp.id.dth.dk (directory ST). From February 1 these ftp directories will
also contain public-domain tools supporting the material in the book as well
as additional files containing known errors and solutions to exercises.



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From the preface of 


            A  FORMAL  APPROACH  TO  HARDWARE  DESIGN


This is a book about designing computations to be realized by application
specific hardware. Today, such hardware is often complicated and its cost is
dominated by the design effort.  This has for a long time been the case for
software development.  Therefore, there is an increasing similarity between
hardware and software design, and they share a need for powerful, reliable,
and efficient design methods. In software design there has been a trend towards
using of high-level languages, encouraging the use of abstraction and rigorous
analysis methods.  This book supports a similar trend for hardware design
by introducing a high-level design language, called Synchronized Transitions.
The aim is to reduce the design time/effort by shifting as many tasks as possible
from low-level circuit oriented models to high-level models. Design descrip-
tions in Synchronized Transitions provide models of computations which can
be utilized for many different purposes, for example:

-   experimentation,

-   verification, and

-   performance analysis,

Furthermore, the descriptions can be refined to obtain circuit realizations, either
through automatic synthesis or by manually guided transformations.

This book shows the usefulness of a formal approach without being too dog-
matic about its use. The rigor provided by formalism is needed for handling
the complicated parts of a design. However, there are also parts where formal
methods have no role to play. One should not insist that everything is done for-
mally, but leave it to the designer's good taste to decide when formal analysis
is appropriate and when more informal approaches are adequate. The intention
with Synchronized Transitions is to provide a language where formal analysis
is a possibility, but not mandatory.  Training is a prerequisite for using any
approach or tool, including formal methods. By reading this book and solving
some of the problems, a designer should get a sufficient background for using
abstract models and a formal approach to solve complicated design problems.


Using the Book for Teaching

This book gives an in depth introduction to a particular formal design approach.
There is a collection of exercises at the end of each chapter. Most of these are
small exercises aimed at training the material presented in that chapter.
The book can be read by students or practioners without prior knowledge
about formal designs methods.  To follow the derivations in detail and to
solve the exercises require a good command of elementary logic and either a
programming language or a hardware description language.

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