Designing Correct Circuits -

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Résumé :
These proceedings contain the papers presented at a workshop on Designing Correct Circuits, jointly organised by the Universities of Oxford and Glasgow, and held in Oxford on 26-28 September 1990. There is a growing interest in the application to hardware design of the techniques of software engineering. As the complexity of hardware systems grows, and as the cost both in money and time of making design errors becomes more apparent, so there is an eagerness to build on the success of mathematical techniques in program develop? ment. The harsher constraints on hardware designers mean both that there is a greater need for good abstractions and rigorous assurances of the trustworthyness of designs, and also that there is greater reason to expect that these benefits can be realised. The papers presented at this workshop consider the application of mathematics to hardware design at several different levels of abstraction. At the lowest level of this spectrum, Zhou and Hoare show how to describe and reason about synchronous switching circuits using UNilY, a formalism that was developed for reasoning about parallel programs. Aagaard and Leeser use standard mathematical tech? niques to prove correct their implementation of an algorithm for Boolean simplification. The circuits generated by their formal synthesis system are thus correct by construction. Thuau and Pilaud show how the declarative language LUSTRE, which was designed for program? ming real-time systems, can be used to specify synchronous circuits.

Sommaire:
Contents: Constrained proofs.- Hardware synthesis in constructive type theory.- An algebraic framework for data abstraction in hardware description.- Generic specification of digital hardware.- Sampling and Proof: A Half-case Study.- High level test generation via process composition.- Towards truly delay-insensitive circuit realizations of process algebras.- The design of a delay-insensitive stack.- Specifying the micro-program parallelism for microprocessors of the von Neumann style.- The implementation and proof of a Boolean simplification system.- A model for synchronous switching circuits.- Efficient circuits as implementations of non-strict functions.- Verification of synchronous concurrent algorithms.- Use of the OTTER Theorem Prover for the Formal Verification of Hardware.- Proof-based transformation of formal hardware models.- Ruby algebra.- Using the declarative language LUSTRE for circuit verification.- Optimising designs by transposition.- Author Index.