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From: mshute@cs.man.ac.uk (Malcolm Shute)
Newsgroups: comp.lsi.cad
Subject: Re: State Machine Compilers
Message-ID: <2715@m1.cs.man.ac.uk>
Date: 18 Jun 91 10:50:31 GMT
References: <21422@cadillac.CAD.MCC.COM> <10809@idunno.Princeton.EDU>
Sender: news@cs.man.ac.uk
Reply-To: mshute@cs.man.ac.uk (Malcolm Shute)
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester UK
Lines: 17

In article <10809@idunno.Princeton.EDU> miyazaki@taichung (Takeshi Miyazaki) writes:
>Is there any state assignment program which can reduce finite state machine?
>(reduce the number of states and generate equivalent FSM)

It's probably not what you were asking for (since it was only a 'toy'
research package): but does anyone know if anything commercially usable
came out of an M.Sc. thesis by Simon Finn (1983) of the Programming Research
Group (Oxford University)... he used Mary Sheeran's HDL (called uFP) to
describe a simple Minsky machine, going through the same sort of
process as Mead and Conway (1980) did in section 6.2 of their book
(An Introduction to VLSI Systems)... i.e. Starting with the processor
described as a single, massive FSM, it was mathematically decomposed
into a network of much smaller FSMs (e.g. the PC, and PSW could be
broken off from the main loop, and then the register bank, etc).
--

Malcolm SHUTE.         (The AM Mollusc:   v_@_ )        Disclaimer: all