Behavior tables: A basis for system representation and transformational system synthesis

Introduces behavior tables, an extension of register transfer tables, as a unified basis for reasoning about control, datapath, protocol, and data expansion facets of system synthesis. Behavior tables can model indirection in system specification, by allowing names of registers and states to be treated as values. Behavior tables are based on a finite state machine model and provide a framework for transformational design to derive a formally correct implementation from a specification. To illustrate our approach, we sketch some transformations on a behavior table description of the FM9001 processor.