Representation of control and timing behavior with applications to interface synthesis

The authors describe a formalism for the representation of interface behavior which can be used for high-level synthesis by a design automation system. The Design Data Structure can represent the many facets of interface behavior in a unified way, including timing constraints, synchronous and asynchronous signals, control flow, and data manipulation. Its descriptive power is more complete than some other formalisms in use, including event and annotated data-flow graphs. The representations described here can be used by data path synthesizers to capture more complex timing information than is typically handled and to separate control from data manipulation information to produce cleaner data flow graphs. The Design Data Structure has been used successfully as an internal representation for a natural-language interface for system specification