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|          TECHNICAL REPORT ECE-95-1           |
|                 March 1995                   |
| Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering |
|           University of Victoria             |
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TITLE: Assessing the Feasibility of Hardware Interface Designs
       in Microprocessor-based Systems

AUTHORS: Marco A. Escalante and Nikitas Dimopoulos

ABSTRACT

In this paper we address the feasibility of an "abstract" interface design.
Dame is an expert microprocessor-based-systems designer. Once the system
architecture has been selected and the major components (processors,
memories, io devices) have been instantiated from a component library,
dame designs the necessary glue logic to integrate the system.
Such interface design is carried out according to the protocols
followed by the components. The design is called "feasible" if it 
achieves the desired functionality and satisfies the timing constraints
of the protocols. In this paper we address the problem of determining
the feasibility of a design prior to its implementation. Because timing
is an important aspect of a correct design, we use an interpreted timed
Petri net to represent the timed behavior of protocols. Using a technique
called timing analysis for synthesis we can check if a 
design is feasible even before logic synthesis is carried out.