Automatic synthesis of VHDL hardware components from IOPT Petri net models

The IOPT Petri net class, designed to implement embedded system controllers, combining the well known properties of Petri nets with input and output functions, provides a set of capabilities suitable to specify digital controller systems. This paper presents an automatic code generation tool used to create VHDL controller implementations of IOPT models and describes the underlying code generation strategies. The new tool is integrated under the Web based IOPT-Tools framework (accessible at http://gres.uninova.pt), containing a complete tool-chain ranging from interactive model design and edition, model checking and simulation tools to automatic code generation, allowing the design of embedded system controllers using only graphical tools and without the need to manually write any hardware description or software code.