Protocol Generation for Communication Channels

System-level partitioning groups processes and variables in the system specification into modules representing chips and memories. Communication between the modules is represented by abstract communication channels, which are merged and implemented as a bus to minimize interconnect. Given a set of channels, bus generation synthesizes the bus structure, by trading off the the width of the bus and the performance of the processes communicating over it. For each channel, we describe a method to generate protocols that specify the mechanism of data transfer over the bus. Protocol generation presented in this paper results in a refined system specification that is simulatable. Both bus-generation and protocol-generation are demonstrated on detailed examples.