Automatic synthesis of interfaces between incompatible protocols

Abstract

At the system level, reusable Intellectual Property (or IP) blocks can be represented abstractly as blocks that exchange messages. The concrete implementations of these IP blocks must exchange the messages through complex signaling protocols. Interfacing between IP that use different signaling protocols is a tedious and error prone design task. We propose using regular expression based protocol descriptions to show how to map the message onto a signaling protocol. Given two protocols, an algorithm is proposed to build an interface machine. We have implemented our algorithm in a program named PIG that synthesizes a Verilog implementation based on a regular expression protocol description.