Proposal for the 2004 INRIA associated project-teams program Formal methods and models for compositional system-level design

The design productivity gap has been recognized by the semiconductor industry as one of the major threats to the continued growth of system-on-chips and embedded systems. Ad-hoc system-level design methodologies, that lift modeling to higher levels of abstraction, and the concept of intellectual property (IP), that promotes reuse of existing components, are essential steps to manage design complexity. However, the issue of compositional correctness arises with these steps. Given components from different manufacturers, designed with heterogeneous models, at different levels of abstraction, assembling them in a correct-by-construction manner is a difficult challenge. We address this challenge by proposing a behavioral type inference system to capture SystemC components’ behavior at the interface level. The proposed type theory grounds a modeling and specification methodology, formulated in terms of a module system, that reduces compositional design correctness verification to the validation of synthesized proof obligations. The proposed type theory is conceptually minimal, equipped with a formal semantics, defined in a synchronous model of computation and supports a scalable notion and a flexible degree of abstraction. Our collaboration targets the de facto standard SystemC, yet with generic and language-independent techniques. Its applications range from the detection of local design errors to the compositional assembly of modules. Focus: Architecture-aware embedded software design, compositional system-level hardware-software co-design, behavioral type theory, semantic-based program transformations.