Synthesis of AMBA AHB from Formal Specification

Abstract: The standard procedure for hardware design consists of describing circuit in a hardware description language at logic level followed by extensive verification and logic-synthesis. However, this process consumes significant time and needs a lot of effort. An alternative is to use formal specification language as a high-level hardware description language and synthesize hardware from formal specification. Bloem et.al. gave formal specifications and synthesize the AMBA AHB Arbiter. Our contributions are as follows:(1) We present more complete and compact formal specifications for the AMBA AHB Arbiter, and obtain significant (order of magnitude) improvement in synthesis results (both with respect to time and the number of gates of the synthesize circuit); (2) we present formal specification and synthesize to generate compact circuits for the remaining two components of the AMBA AHB protocol, namely, the AMBA AHB Master and AMBA AHB Slave; and (3) from the lessons learnt we present few principles for writing formal specifications for efficient hardware synthesis. Thus with intelligently written complete formal specifications we are able to automatically synthesize an important and widely used industrial protocol.