Automatic synthesis of communication controller hardware from protocol specifications

Controllers for serial protocols are control-oriented designs that include complex state machines. Manually designing protocol controllers is thus tedious, error prone, and time-consuming. We present a new methodology for the efficient design of communication controller hardware suited for (but not limited to) complex, bit-serial protocols. Our methodology synthesizes controller hardware from a formal high-level specification of the protocol. In this approach, a single run of the synthesis algorithm synthesizes a complete communication architecture from a single protocol specification. The method not only reduces modeling effort but also ensures that both the interacting transaction producer and consumer controllers conform to the initial protocol specification.