System cars and its description language

Abstract

System CARS (a Computer Aid for Recursive Synthesis) has been developed to assist the designer in the synthesis phase of the design of digital systems. CARS applies a top-down structured approach in the design process and can be used at any user-defined level of refinement. CARS does not apply any restriction on the creative work of the designer, but it only gives means to describe his concepts and tools to check his results. The design language defined for CARS is well suited to describe behavioral concepts and structures as well. One of the most important feature is that the designer can use the same SHADE/CARS language for both purposes. CARS supports the consistency analysis of the refinement level achieved and it not only compares neighboring levels of the same design, but at the same time it derives functional tests for the lower-level structure. At the end of the design process these tests are automatically composed into a functional test of the hardware designed. Each level of the design is kept in the CARS library and can be modified at any moment of the design process. When modification takes place CARS makes a thorough analysis of it thus enforcing correctness. When using multi-level simulation as an analysis tool of CARS, the system provides standard means for data and time refinements and coarsening as well.