System Design of a CC-NUMA Multiprocessor Architecture Using Formal Specification, Model-Checking, Co-Simulation, and Test Generation

The application of formal methods to system-level design of hardware components is still an open issue for which concrete case-studies are needed. We present here an industrial experiment concerning the application of the process algebraic language Lotos (ISO standard 8807) to the design of Polykid, a CC-NUMA (Cache Coherent -- Non Uniform Memory Access) multiprocessor architecture developed by Bull. The formal descriptions developed for Polykid have served as a basis not only for model-checking verification using CADP (Caesar/Aldebaran Development Package), but also for hardware-software co-simulation using the Exec/Caesar tool, and for automatic generation of executable tests using the TGV tool