HOP: A PROCESS MODEL FOR SYNCHRONOUS HARDWARE SEMANTICS, AND EXPERIMENTS IN PROCESS COMPOSITION

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
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