Timing Diagrams: Formalization and Algorithmic Verification

  • Authors:
  • Kathi Fisler

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, Rice University, 6100 S. Main, MS 132, Houston, TX 77005-1892, U.S.A. (E-mail: kfisler@cs.rice.edu)

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Logic, Language and Information
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

Timing diagrams are popular in hardware design. They have been formalized for use in reasoning tasks, such as computer-aided verification. These efforts have largely treated timing diagrams as interfaces to established notations for which verification is decidable; this has restricted timing diagrams to expressing only regular language properties. This paper presents a timing diagram logic capable of expressing certain context-free and context-sensitive properties. It shows that verification is decidable for properties expressible in this logic. More specifically, it shows that containment of ω-regular languages generated by Büchi automata in timing diagram languages is decidable. The result relies on a correlation between timing diagram and reversal bounded counter machine languages.