A Behavioral Type Inference System for Compositional System-on-Chip Design

• Venue: ACSD '04 Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Application of Concurrency to System Design
• Year: 2004

The design productivity gap has been recognized by thesemiconductor industry as one of the major threats to thecontinued growth of system-on-chips and embedded systems.Ad-hoc system-level design methodologies, that liftsmodeling to higher levels of abstraction, and the conceptof intellectual property (IP), that promotes reuse of existingcomponents, are essential steps to manage design complexity.However, the issue of compositional correctnessarises with these steps. Given components from differentmanufacturers, designed with heterogeneous models, at differentlevels of abstraction, assembling them in a correct-by-construction manner is a difficult challenge. We address this challenge by proposing a process algebraic model tosupport system design with a formal model of computationand serve as a behavioral type system to capture the behaviorof system components at the interface level. The proposedtype system is conceptually minimal and supports ascalable notion and a flexible degree of abstraction. Ourpresentation targets the de facto standard SystemC, yet witha generic and language-independent method. Applicationsof our technique range from the detection of local designerrors to the compositional assembly of modules.