Different Kinds of System Descriptions as Synchronous Programs

Many different system description and specification languages are used in modern design flows to emphasize different aspects like modular architecture, multithreaded behavior, abstract action-oriented behavior, and the desired temporal properties. However, the use of many specialized languages complicates the development of seamless and robust design flows. In this article, we show that synchronous languages are powerful enough to capture the mentioned aspects of system descriptions as simple syntactic sugar. In particular, we show how hardware structures, multithreaded and action-oriented programs as well as property specification languages can be incorporated in a synchronous programming language so that a single core language with a powerful compiler can handle all design descriptions in a consistent way. Keywords Synchronous languages, specification languages, system design