SLIF: a specification-level intermediate format for system design

As methodologies and tools for chip-level design mature, design effort becomes focused on higher abstraction levels. Presently, much effort is focused on system-level design, where the key tasks include system component allocation, functional partitioning and transformation, and coarse estimation. However, commonly-used internal formats of functionality, such as the control-dataflow graph, are too fine-grained for the system level. We introduce a more abstract format, and we demonstrate its order-of-magnitude more efficient support of system design tasks and its support of practical designer interaction. The format is used by the SpecSyn system design environment, and can be extended to handle many new system design problems