Processes, Objects and Finite Events: On a formal model of concurrent (hardware) systems

This paper discusses aspects of the operational semantics of a set of linguistic primitives for specifying hardware systems. The primitives allow such systems to be viewed as a combination of objects and processes. Two important features of the development are the ability to deal with finite events (i.e., events having extended durations, as opposed to abstract point events), and accommodate true concurrency. These features allow the development of a notion of observational equivalence that allows systems to be viewed during appropriate “windows” of time, and that is closer to the notion used in dealing with real hardware systems. While the major applications motivating this work arose in modelling and designing hardware (VLSI) systems, many of the issues discussed are relevant in the context of general concurrent and distributed systems, and calculii for such systems.

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