Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

In this report, issues related to design descriptions are discussed. Several existing description styles including timing diagrams, algorithmic-state-machine charts, state-action tables, VHDL, SpecCharts, and signal-flow graphs are investigated, and their features are compared. Five examples (addressed handshake read protocol, parallel counters, controlled counter, finite-impulse-response (FIR) filter, anda simple computer system) described in different styles are also presented.