Human intellectual capacity to manage complex design processes is continually thwarted by advances in scale and variety of VLSI technologies, increasing sophistication of synthesis and verification tools, and escalating time-to-market pressures. This research focuses on reasoning support tools for decomposing high-level system specifications into synthesizable components. The underlying format is rigorous enough to support, and in some cases supplant, formal verification tasks. Human interaction centers on a novel tabular notation developed by the PI, whose synchronous semantics matches the intended models in high level synthesis. Resulting software includes a system for animating behavior tables and mapping them to existing synthesis languages, a graphical interface for interactively building and manipulating behavior tables, and an integrated formal system for transforming and reasoning about them. These components can be used individually or in combination. The software is widely and freely distributed and is part of a repository of Scheme-based modeling tools.
