Formal Semantics of Synchronous Transfer Architecture

Abstract

This paper explores the use of formal verification methods for complex and highly parallel state machines. For this purpose, a framework named Synchronous Transfer Architecture (STA) is being used. STA is a generic framework for digital hardware development that contains VLIW, FPGA, and hardwired ASIC architectures as corner cases. It maintains a strictly deterministic system behavior in order to achieve substantial savings in hardware costs, thus enabling systems with high clock speed, low power consumption and small die area. The high degree of parallelism requires a diligent development methodology to avoid implementation errors. Consequently, formal verification is the methodology of choice for reliable verification. The contribution of this paper is a formal semantics for the STA hardware architecture framework. This semantics is then used for the formal verification of an optimized parallel implementation of Fast Fourier Transformation (FFT) on STA. This is achieved using a combination of the semantics and symbolic evaluation.