Goal-oriented hardware design

This thesis presents Fide, a hardware design system that uses Goal-oriented programming. Goal-oriented programming is a programming framework to specify open-ended decision logic. This approach relies on two fundamental concepts-Goals and Techniques. Goals encode decision points and Techniques are scripts that describe how to satisfy Goals. In Fide, Goals represent the functional requirements (e.g., addition of two 32-bit binary integers) of the target circuit. Techniques represent hardware implementation alternatives that fulfill the functions. Techniques may declare their own subgoals, allowing a hierarchical decomposition of the functions. A Planner selects among Techniques based on the Goals declared to generate an implementation of the target circuit automatically. Users' preferences can be added to generate circuits for different scenarios: for different hardware environments, under different circuit constraints, or different implementation criteria etc. A Beta processor is implemented using Fide. The quality of the implementation is comparable to those optimized manually.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2008

Author dc:creator

• Chau, Man Ping Grace

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Steve Ward.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/45853

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/45853