Design Examples

Abstract

This chapter presents a set of design examples that reflect typical cases in which the methods described in the previous chapters may be used. These examples also illustrate the practical strengths and weaknesses of the methodology, depending on the type of controllers or interfaces synthesized with it. This issue is important for two reasons. One is that real life design cases typically involve a combination of manual and automatic synthesis activities. In this respect, the reader should not overestimate the expressiveness of the language of STGs, or even PNs, as well as the power of algorithms and tools to always produce robust and efficient circuits. The class of PNs for which the corresponding STG can be implemented as a logic circuit is basically only restricted by the property of boundedness. No structural constraints are imposed on PNs. However, the method clearly has practical limitations. Those are related, firstly, to the limited size of the STGs that can be realistically implemented into circuits by the existing software tools (effectiveness aspect), and secondly, to the types of PNs and their signal interpretation, for example whether they involve regular patterns or require massive additional state coding (efficiency aspect). Some of our examples will reveal such problems.