Grammar-based hardware synthesis from port-size independent specifications

A protocol defines how systems communicate. There are two ways of specifying the protocol, the language of communication. One way is to specify the automaton that recognizes the language, and this is the approach taken by SDL, etc. The other more abstract way ss to specify the grammar of the language and let a tool synthesize the automaton. Directly specifying the automaton makes the specification implementation dependent in two ways: the time behavior is specified in terms of states, and the width of the inputs and outputs is fixed. By specifying the grammar, the specification is potentially independent of both these implementation details and allows design space exploration in these dimensions. This paper presents a grammar-based language, called Program, that supports a port-size independent specifications methodology and its application to parts of the Operation and Maintenance protocol, a typical application from the ATM world. The methodology has also been applied to another test set of example designs and compared to standard RTL synthesis and HLS in order to evaluate the quality of the produced designs.