A Scalable Hardware Library for the Rapid Prototyping of SDL Specifications

A known problem in the area of hardware/software codesign is the selection of the proper interface between the different parts of the design. This paper presents a technique which eases the selection by combining different synthesis techniques together with rapid prototyping. Application field of the technique is the design of communication systems where C and VHDL are generated from a specification given in SDL. For the VHDL area, high-level synthesis is used to synthesize a behavioural description. 1 Introduction Today's communication systems are getting more and more complex with an increasing development effort. To overcome this problem, formal methods and languages are used during the development process. One widely used example is SDL [9]. Its formal semantics allows the verification of distributed protocol specifications against deadlocks, lifelocks, availability of protocol states and other functional attributes. The implementation of the specified systems can then be done by ..