Hardware/Software Synthesis and Verification Using Esterel

The principal contribution of this paper is the demonstration of a promising technique for the synthesis of hardware and software from a single specification which is also amenable to formal analysis. We also demonstrate how the notion of synchronous observers may provide a way for engineers to express formal assertions about circuits which may be more accessible then the emerging grammar based approaches. We also report that the semantic basis for the system we evaluate pays dividends when formal static analysis is performed using model checking.