Requirements specification and analysis of digital systems using FARHDL

As expert system technology gains wider acceptance in digital system design, the need to build and maintain a large scale knowledge base will assume greater importance. However, how to build a correct and efficient rule base is even a hard part in the knowledge-based system development. In this paper, we develop FARHDL (Frame-And-Rule-based Hardware Description Language) to form a knowledge base. The FARHDL is simple but powerful to specify the hardware requirements and can be directly simulated by PROLOG. Through the knowledge base transformed from FARHDL, a formal method can be developed to design, implement, and validate the digital hardware systems. Furthermore, behavioral properties, anomaly properties, structural properties, and timing properties are applied to analyze the requirements specification. The purposes of those properties are used to detect explicit/implicit incorrect specification clauses and to capture some desired requirements, such as completeness and consistency. Finally, the analysis results can be a useful tool for finding obscure problems in tricky digital system designs and can also aid in the development of formal specifications.