Instruct: Identify the main and secondary category of Arxiv papers based on the titles and abstracts
Query: Instruction-Level Abstraction (ILA): A Uniform Specification for
  System-on-Chip (SoC) Verification   Modern Systems-on-Chip (SoC) designs are increasingly heterogeneous and
contain specialized semi-programmable accelerators in addition to programmable
processors. In contrast to the pre-accelerator era, when the ISA played an
important role in verification by enabling a clean separation of concerns
between software and hardware, verification of these "accelerator-rich" SoCs
presents new challenges. From the perspective of hardware designers, there is a
lack of a common framework for the formal functional specification of
accelerator behavior. From the perspective of software developers, there exists
no unified framework for reasoning about software/hardware interactions of
programs that interact with accelerators. This paper addresses these challenges
by providing a formal specification and high-level abstraction for accelerator
functional behavior. It formalizes the concept of an Instruction Level
Abstraction (ILA), developed informally in our previous work, and shows its
application in modeling and verification of accelerators. This formal ILA
extends the familiar notion of instructions to accelerators and provides a
uniform, modular, and hierarchical abstraction for modeling software-visible
behavior of both accelerators and programmable processors. We demonstrate the
applicability of the ILA through several case studies of accelerators (for
image processing, machine learning, and cryptography), and a general-purpose
processor (RISC-V). We show how the ILA model facilitates equivalence checking
between two ILAs, and between an ILA and its hardware finite-state machine
(FSM) implementation. Further, this equivalence checking supports accelerator
upgrades using the notion of ILA compatibility, similar to processor upgrades
using ISA compatibility.

31
The categories of this paper are: ao-sci
9
The categories of this paper are: nlin
26
The categories of this paper are: bayes-an
24
The categories of this paper are: dg-ga
11
The categories of this paper are: hep-lat
10
The categories of this paper are: q-bio
29
The categories of this paper are: funct-an
27
The categories of this paper are: comp-gas
14
The categories of this paper are: math-ph
6
The categories of this paper are: astro-ph
34
The categories of this paper are: chem-ph
36
The categories of this paper are: cmp-lg
4
The categories of this paper are: cond-mat
28
The categories of this paper are: alg-geom
32
The categories of this paper are: atom-ph
2
The categories of this paper are: math