Specification of exception handling in grammar-based hardware synthesis

ProGram is our in-house grammar based specification language targeted to specification of protocols, interfaces and control dominated functionality. The Program compiler implements such specifications in hardware. Specification of exception handling functionality and its automatic implementation are key requirements for a robust design methodology. In this paper, we present extensions to the ProGram language for specification of a wide range of exception handling functionality: reset to deal with exception handling needs of global nature, interrupt for representing exception handling on a hierarchical basis and error sequences to handle situations when inputs are not according to the specified grammar