Behavioural synthesis support system for undergraduate teaching

As a result of a significant research effort over recent years, behavioural synthesis is now becoming accepted as a valuable technique for designing complex digital systems. Many, if not all, of the current systems are intended to achieve the transformation from behaviour to implementation in a completely automatic fashion via a silicon compiler. However, the paper shows that the formalism required by such an approach can have significant educational benefits by permitting the transformation and hence the design process to be described in a structural form. To assist the learning process, a support system has been developed which provides the following facilities. A transformation environment has been implemented which permits the student to interact with the tools in order to map a behavioural description into a structural form, which can express both the scheduling and allocation aspects of the synthesis process. An online behavioural synthesis tutoring system is available which operates at two levels. The first provides a range of graded assignments and supporting explanations. At the second level, support is provided to allow the student to explore the design space