Indiana University Computer Science Department toward a Basis for Protocol Speciication and Process Decomposition toward a Basis for Protocol Speciication and Process Decomposition

In a formalism of top-down design, we consider the decomposition of behavioral speci-cations into interacting sequential components. The higher level of description speciies the operations to be performed in a major computation step. The goal is to incorporate a given interface speciication in a lower-level speciication that accounts for interactions with and among sequential components. This construction generalizes the earlier formalism of system factorization 14] to include interface protocols. It expands on the objectives of high-level synthesis by considering control-synchronization loops in scheduling. This paper presents a speciication language for sequential process interaction and develops an interpretation based on nite-state-machines. Operations of minimization, composition and complementation are deened; the last of these being the key to top-down decomposition. A small example is used to illustrate the ideas.