Digital systems synthesis from Petri net descriptions

The design of digital systems has reached a degree of complexity that virtually prevents their effective realization without computer aided design tools. Several languages were already proposed to be used in such tools, each with the objective of capturing as much hardware characteristics as possible. During about the last fifteen years the importance and use of Petri nets as a language for modeling digital systems have greatly increased. Many computer aided design tools dealing with Petri nets for the analyzis, verification and synthesis of this sort of hardware have been recently developed as well. With such a growing importance in mind, this report aims at presenting an overview of the research going on the application of Petri nets to the description of digital systems and the synthesis of the corresponding hardware from these descriptions