HOP: A PROCESS MODEL FOR SYNCHRONOUS HARDWARE SEMANTICS, AND EXPERIMENTS IN PROCESS COMPOSITION
Date
1989-04-01
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Abstract
We present a language "Hardware viewed as Objects and Processes"
(HOP) for specifying the structure, behavior, and timing of hardware
systems. HOP embodies a simple process model for lock-step synchronous
processes. An absproc specification written in HOP describes the
externally observable behavior of a process. A collection of absprocs
may be composed to form a larger process, using the operators parallel
composition, renaming, and hiding. In this paper we present the
communication primitives of HOP, illustrate HOP through several examples,
and then present its operational semantics. We present an algorithm
PARCOMP that is based on HOP's semantics. We illustrate three uses of PARCOMP:
(i) inferring concise behavioral descriptions of systems from
their structural descriptions; (ii) static detection of control timing
errors during behavioral inference; (iii) productive and run-time
efficient functional simulation using the inferred behavior.
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Computer Science