ABSTRACT
Substantial progress is being made in behavioral and logic synthesis, both of which currently depend on specifications in formal notations such as hardware description languages. During the conceptual phase of new product develop ment, however, system or architectural specifications are usually expressed in English or another natural language, possibly accompanied by general block diagrams. Extending the notion of automatic synthesis to the architectural level in support of the conceptual design phase requires dealing with specifications written in English. This chapter reports on a research project to design an interac tive system that is capable of automatically interpreting English specifications in terms of constructs currently employed in formal design representations such as those used as input to behavioral and logic synthesis. This project was initiated in 1984 [1,2] at Control Data Corporation, Minneapolis, MN, with the intent of
improving the quality of specifications and in increasing the productivity of the specification process. Since this beginning, it has become apparent that an auto mated system meeting these goals would also be capable of synthesizing engi neering models from the specifications. Because a great deal of work remains to be done, a design strategy for an automated interpreter has been developed and part of the system has reached the prototype stage.
