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An incremental approach for hardware discrete controller synthesis

The Discrete Controller Synthesis (DCS) technique is used for automatic generation of correct-by-construction hardware controllers. For a given plant (a state-based model), and an associated control specification (a behavioral requirement), DCS generates a controller which, composed with the plant, guarantees the satisfaction of the specification. The DCS technique used relies on binary decision diagrams (BDDs). The controllers generated must be compliant with standard RTL hardware synthesis tools. Two main issues have been investigated: the combinational explosion, and the actual generation of the hardware controller. To address combinational explosion, common approaches follow the "divide and conquer" philosophy, producing modular control and/or decentralized control. Most of these approaches do not consider explicit communication between different components of a plant. Synchronization is mostly achieved by sharing of input events, and outputs are abstracted away. We propose an incremental DCS technique which also applies to communicating systems. An initial modular abstraction is followed by a sequence of progressive refinements and computations of approximate control solutions. The last step of this sequence computes an exact controller. This technique is shown to have an improved time/memory efficiency with respect to the traditional global DCS approach. The hardware controller generation addresses the control non-determinism problem in a specific way. A partially closed-loop control architecture is proposed, in order to preserve the applicability of hierarchical design. A systematic technique is proposed and illustrated, for transforming the automatically generated control equation into a vector of control functions. An application of the DCS technique to the correction of certain design errors in a real design is illustrated. To prove the efficiency of the incremental synthesis and controller implementation, a number of examples have been studied.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:CCSD/oai:tel.archives-ouvertes.fr:tel-00679296
Date27 July 2011
CreatorsRen, Mingming
PublisherINSA de Lyon
Source SetsCCSD theses-EN-ligne, France
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypePhD thesis

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