Formalizing the Incremental Design and Verification Process of a Pipelined Protocol Converter

This work studies the relations between pipeline architectures and their specification expressed in CTL. We propose a method to build pipeline structures incrementally from a simple one (already verified) to a more complex one. Moreover, we show how each increment can be integrated in a CTL specification. We define increments to model treatment delay and treatment abortion of a pipeline flow, and we formalize the composition of the different increments. In order to represent the increments added to an architecture, we derive a set of CTL formulae transformations. Finally we model a control flow of a protocol converter by composition of these increments. We show how CTL properties of the complex architecture are built by applying automatic transformations on the set of CTL properties of the simplest architecture