Synthesis and Implementation of Hierarchical Finite State Machines with Implicit Modules

The paper describes a hierarchical finite state machine (HFSM) with implicit modules, which inherits capabilities of existing models (in particular, provides support for modularity, hierarchy, and recursion), requires a very simple stack memory, and permits optimization methods developed for conventional FSMs to be reused. The HFSM has been tested in several practical applications briefly characterized in the paper. It is shown that the same hardware can implement different algorithms through the proposed reconfiguration technique. The results of experiments, reported in the paper, clearly demonstrate advantages of the proposed model.