Specification Mining for Asynchronous Controllers

The paper presents a first effort at exploring a novel area in the domain of asynchronous controllers: specification mining. Rather than synthesizing circuits from specifications, we aim at doing reverse engineering, i.e., discovering safe specifications from the circuits that preserve a set of pre-defined behavioral properties (e.g., hazard freeness). The specifications are discovered without any previous knowledge of the behavior of the circuit environment. This area may open new opportunities for re-synthesis and verification of asynchronous controllers. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated by mining concurrent specifications (Signal Transition Graphs) from multiple implementations of 4-phase handshake controllers and some controllers with choice.