Refinement of finite-state machines

This paper introduces a new level of description between behavioral and low-level descriptions of FSMs, which is termed behavioral phase description. A behavioral phase description is a refinement of a given FSM. If the FSM is described at low level, some states may be clustered into behavioral phases to simplify the treatment of the FSM. If it is described at behavioral level, behavioral phases can be extracted from the behavioral description. Behavioral phase descriptions can be utilized in functional analysis, verification and test of FSM designs, The paper presents the concept of behavioral phase description to bridge the high and low level descriptions, Experiments show that the refining process can be very efficient.