Object-oriented modelling of parallel hardware systems

Object-oriented techniques like inheritance promise great benefits for the specification and design of parallel hardware systems. The difficulties which arise from the use of inheritance in parallel hardware systems are analysed in this article. Similar difficulties are well known in concurrent object-oriented programming as the inheritance anomaly but have not yet been investigated in object-oriented hardware design. A solution to how to successfully deal with the anomaly is presented for a type based on an object-oriented extension to VHDL. Its basic idea is to separate the synchronisation code (protocol specification) and the actual behaviour of a method. Method guards which allow a method to execute if a guard expression evaluates to true are proposed to model synchronisation constraints. It is shown how to implement a suitable re-schedule mechanism for methods as part of the synchronisation code to handle the case that a guard expression is evaluated to false