Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

SpecCharts is a new language intended for system level specification and synthesis. SpecCharts represent a multi-module system with a hierarchy of state diagrams, catering to the expression of concurrent behavior, and using VHDL sequential statement semantics to describe a leaf state's (a state not composed of substates) functionality. The language permits protocol based data transfer, estimations, constraints, and state based description, all of which enable the omission of detail and thus enhance the comprehension of a system's behavior. The language is intended to represent a design throughout the system and chip levels of synthesis. i.e. converting an abstract specification into a set of one or more interconnected chips/modules, each having a well defined structure or being bound to a prefabricated component. Since good system design requires an executable specification language, SpecCharts can be simulated via automatic conversion to VHDL.