An inlining approach to formal hardware semantics

Hardware components are extremely complex due to concurrency. Modularity has been considered as an effective way to design and understand such complex hardware components. Among various hardware description languages (HDLs), Bluespec allows designers to develop hardware not only based on modularity, but also based on the notion of guarded atomic actions (GAAs). Following the concepts of modularity and GAA, we have been defining a framework called Kami to specify, verify, and synthesize Bluespec-style hardware components. However, modular semantics has an inherent weakness in that it is hard to infer internal changes. In this thesis, I present a new semantic approach based on inlining. Inlining semantics is defined for open hardware systems and resolves the weakness by construction. An implication from modular semantics to inlining semantics is also formally proven; thus the inlining semantics can be used to efficiently prove hardware properties.

Department dc:contributor.department

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

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2016

Author dc:creator

• Choi, Joonwon

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Arvind.

• 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/1721.1/105576

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/105576