A type system for static typing of a domain-specific language

With the increase in system complexity, designers are increasingly using IP blocks as a means for filling the designer productivity gap. This has given rise to system level languages which connect IP blocks together. However, these languages have in general not been subject to formalisation. They are considered too trivial to justify the formalisation effort. Unfortunately, the lack of formality in these languages can give rise to errors that are not caught until late in the design cycle. We present a type system for static typing of such a system level language. We argue that the proposed type system will eliminate an important class of errors currently permitted by existing system level languages. A comparison is made against existing tools and we show that the type checker detects errors earlier in the design flow. This reduces synthesis iterations and decreases the time to market