Semantics of digital circuits (Q1099132)

Because of the considerable progress in hardware, a need arose, as well as in software, for an adequate mathematical methodology in the design process. In the last years, theories and languages attempted the formalization of various aspects of hardware description and verification. In such a context, this book is a new and interesting approach for formally describing the behavior of digital integrated circuits; the STREAM (acronym for STandard REpresentation of Algorithms for Microelectronics) language is presented, upon which a methodology of design and development of digital systems can be built. STREAM is a language for processing streams, i.e. sequences of finite or infinite length defined on a basic domain, and which allows the description of concurrent systems. After a textual and graphical representation of the syntax and semantics of the language, a chapter is devoted to the translation of the procedural programs into STREAM. The use of this language for the description of digital circuits at different levels of complexity is the aim of an important part of the book. Thus, modifying the basic domains for the streams, the author applies the STREAM language to successively describe synchronous modules (at register transfer level), asynchronous circuits (at gate level) and MOS circuits (at switch level).