From Statecharts to Verilog: a formal approach to hardware/software co-specification

Hardware/software co-specification is a critical phase in co-design. Our co-specification process starts with a high level graphical description in Statecharts and ends with an equivalent parallel composition of hardware and software descriptions in Verilog. In this paper, we first investigate the Statecharts formalism by providing it a formal syntax and a compositional operational semantics. Based on that, a semantics-preserving linking function is designed to compile specifications written in Statecharts into Verilog. The obtained Verilog specifications are then passed to a partitioning process to generate hardware and software subspecifications, where the correctness is guaranteed by algebraic laws of Verilog.