Rapid system prototyping from English specifications

Substantial progress is being made for rapid prototyping of systems through advances in behavioral and logic synthesis, both of which depend on specifications in formal notations such as hardware description languages. During the conceptual phase of new product development, however, system or architectural specifications are usually expressed in English or another natural language, possibly accompanied by general block diagrams. Extending the notion of rapid prototyping to the system level to support this conceptual design phase requires dealing with specifications written in natural language. This paper reports on research to design a Specification Interpreter for automatically extracting engineering models from English specifications. The role of the Specification Interpreter in Rapid System Prototyping is suggested in Figure 1. The engineering models extracted from thc English specifications will be expressed both in a graphical form for feedback to the specification author (or 'customer? and in a formal design representation such as those used as input to bchavioral and logic synthesis. While a great deal of work remains to be done, a design strategy for an automated interpreter has been developed and part of the system has reached the prototype slage.