Hardware implementation of communication protocols modeled by concurrent EFSMs with multi-way synchronization

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a technique to implement communication protocols as hardware circuits using a model of concurrent EFSMs with multi-way synchronization. Since use of multi-way synchronization enables simple and comprehensible specifications of recent communication protocols which frequently use complicated mechanisms such as mutual exclusion and dynamic job assignment, the proposed model is expected to reduce development cost in designing/developing such protocols. We implement specifications described in the model so that EFSMs work synchronously with the same clock, and that the synchronization mechanism for checking executability of each tuple of synchronizing transitions is implemented as a combinational logic circuit. Through some experiments, we have confirmed that the proposed technique can synthesize hardware circuits with relatively good performances for practical use.