| Relations and Refinement in Circuit Design (1991) | |||||||||||||||||
Abstract | |||||||||||||||||
| A language of relations and combining forms is presented in which to describe both the behaviour of circuits and the specifications which they must meet. We illustrate a design method that starts by selecting representations for the values on which a circuit operates, and derive the circuit from these representations by a process of refinement entirely within the language. Formal methods have always been used in circuit design. It would be unthinkable to attempt to design combinational circuits without using Boolean algebra. This means that circuit designers, unlike programmers, already use mathematical tools as a matter of course. It also means that we have a good basis on which to build higher level formal design methods. Encouraged by these observations, we have been investigating the application of formal program development techniques to circuit design. We view circuit design as the transformation of a program describing the required behaviour into an equivalent program that is s... | |||||||||||||||||
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