Synchronous Digital Circuits as Functional Programs

Functional programming techniques have been used to describe synchronous digital circuits since the early 1980s and have proven successful at describing certain types of designs. Here we survey the systems and formal underpinnings that constitute this tradition. We situate these techniques with respect to other formal methods for hardware design and discuss the work yet to be done

Arrows for knowledge-based circuits

Knowledge-based programs (KBPs) are a formalism for directly relating agents' knowledge and behaviour in a way that has proven useful for specifying distributed systems. Here we present a scheme for compiling KBPs to executable automata in finite environments with a proof of correctness in Isabelle/HOL. We use Arrows, a functional programming abstraction, to structure a prototype domain-specific synchronous language embedded in Haskell. By adapting our compilation scheme to use symbolic representations we can apply it to several examples of reasonable size

View from the Fringe of the Fringe (extended summary)

Abstract. Formal analysis remains outside the mainstream of system design practice. Interactive methods and tools are regarded by some to be on the margin of useful research in this area. Although it may seem relatively academic to some, it is vital that this the so-called “theorem proving approach ” continue to be as vigorously explored as approaches favoring highly automated reasoning. Design derivation, atermfordesign formalisms based on transformations and equivalence, represents just a small twig on the theorem-proving branch of formal system analysis. A perspective on current trends is presented from this remote outpost, including a review of the author’s work since the early 1980s