Starfish: a Table-centric Tool for Design Derivation

Behavior tables are a visual formalism for representing synchronous systems of com-municating processes. Although behavior tables arose from hardware modeling meth-ods, they operate on arbitrarily abstract data-types. Originally conceived as an aidfor imposing architecture on behaviorally oriented specifications, behavior tables in-herited a structural algebra from the Digital Design Derivation (DDD) system. Thisthesis extends the algebra in three ways. It incorporates a transformation for retim-ing operations. It adds serialization by extending the notion of correctness to includestuttering alignments. It introduces mechanisms for declaring and refining abstractdata types. This thesis further contributes serialization tables—a complementarybehavior table form—for assisting interactive construction of schedules. A proto-type tool, Starfish, implements these technologies. Two medium-scale examples—anSECD machine derivation and an abstract signal factorization for a hardware garbagecollector—demonstrate feasibility of these techniques in non-trivial systems.