Assessing the Feasibility of Hardware Interface Designs in Microprocessor-based Systems

In this paper we address the feasibility of an “abstract” interface design. D AME is an expert microprocessor-based-systems designer. Once the system architecture has been selected and the major components (processors, memories, IO d vices) have been instantiated from a component library, DAME designs the necessary glue logic to integrate the system. Such interface design is carried out according to the protocols followed by the components. The design is called “feasible” if it achieves the desired functionality and satisfies the timing constraints of the protocols. In this paper we address the problem of determining the feasibility of a design prior to its implementation. Because timing is an important aspect of a correct design, we use an interpreted timed Petri net to represent the timed behavior of protocols. Using a technique called timing analysis for synthesis we can check if a design is feasible even before logic synthesis is carried out.

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