Clairvoyant: a synthesis system for production-based specification

This paper describes a new high-level synthesis system based on the hierarchical Production-Based Specification (PBS). Advantages of this form of specification are that the designer does not describe the control flow in terms of explicit states or control variables and that the designer does not describe a particular form of implementation. The production-based specification also separates the specification of the control aspects and data-flow aspects of the design. The control is implicitly described via the production hierarchy, while the data-flow is described explicitly in action computations. This approach is a hardware analog of popular software engineering techniques. The Clairvoyant system automatically constructs a controlling machine from the PBS and this process is not impacted by the possibly exponentially larger deterministic state space of the designs. The encodings generated by the constructions compare favorably to encodings derived using graph-based state encoding techniques in terms of logic complexity and logic depth. These construction techniques utilize recent advances in