Type-Driven Development of SoC Architectures.

Jan gave an internal seminar at the local Systems Seminar.

This talk was an extended version of his earlier SPLS talk.

The protocols that describe the interactions between IP Cores on System-on-a-Chip (SoC) architectures are well-documented, describing not only the structural properties of the physical interfaces but also the behaviour of the emanating signals. However, there is a disconnect between the design of SoC architectures, their formal description, and the verification of their implementation in known hardware description languages.

Within the Border Patrol project we are investigating how to model the structural and behavioural properties of SoC architectures using state-of-the-art advances in programming language research. Namely, we are investigating how dependent types and session types can be leveraged to model hardware communication at design and runtime.

In this talk I will discuss my work in designing a modelling language with a substructural type-system that reasons about the structure of SoC Architectures. This language provide correct-by-construction guarantees over:

• the physical structure of an interaction protocol;
• the adherence of a component’s interface to a given protocol; and
• the validity of the connections made between components.

We provide these guarantees by: (ab)using dependent types as presented within Idris; using novel ideas from programming language design such as Session Types and Thinnings; and incorporating novel ideas to reason about effectful programs, namely Hoare Monads and Resource-Dependent Algebraic Effects.

Slides are not available.