Translating Concurrent Programs into Petri Nets for Synthesis of Asynchronous Circuits

We introduce a high-level synthesis methodology to automatically synthesize asynchronous circuits from a concurrent language called ALEPH. ALEPH is a high-level concurrent algorithmic specification that can model complex concurrent control flow, logical and arithmetic computation, and communication. This specification is translated into a Petri net which has actions. These actions are refined to synthesize the controllers and to allocate the data resources. We use the automatic synthesizer through Signal Transition Graphs that allows to take advantage of logic synthesis methods in the circuit optimization. Major contributions of the work are the generation of globally optimized control circuits and the allocation of data resources from the same high-level description.