Forced Simulation and Lock-Step Interface: A Formal Approach to Automatic Component Matching

Component-based synthesis of embedded systems will lead to the reuse of a vast library of hardware and software components and also facilitate rapid prototyping. However it is still low key, a primary reason being the lack of a systematic attempt at the development of automatic component identification algorithms. The main task of such an algorithm is to to map a design function to a device from a library of system-level components. In this paper, we propose a novel notion of simulation called forced simulation to formalize the correspondence between a function and a device. What distinguishes forced simulation from other techniques is the idea of forcing via an external interface, which can be automatically synthesized, and is useful for adapting the system level component to the given design functionality. We propose a new component matching algorithm based on forced simulation and also propose a technique for the automatic generation of the interface. Finally, a proof of soundness o..