A Model Checking Approach to Protocol Conversion

System-on-chip verification is an active research area. Of particular interest is protocol conversion, where two components with different protocols are controlled to communicate accurately. We present an approach to protocol conversion using model checking. The temporal logic ACTL is used to describe desired behaviour and finite state machines are used for protocol description. We use tableau-based converter construction and prove that a converter exists only when a successful tableau can be constructed. Liveness is incorporated so that converters satisfy additional constraints on protocol communication. A NuSMV-based implementation has been created and we present results on various problems including a large NuSMV example.

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