1. Sugar Advantages Cindy Eisner IBM Research Laboratory in Haifa

2. Advantage 1 – History and Track Record Mature – eight years of practical experience Used with various HDLs: VHDL Verilog Used in designs which are: single clock multi-clock asynchronous Extensive user base: IBM External licensees Contrast to newer, less established languages

3. Advantage 2 – Easy to learn, use Most users are self-taught through a tutorial AG {req[+], ack} |=> {[*],grant,!abort}! AG (hi_pri_req -> next_event_f(gnt)[1..2](dst=hi_pri) In a recent user survey, Sugar was found to be one of the strongest and most appreciated features of the IBM FV toolset

4. Advantage 3 – Succint AG ({go, {get[=8]} && {kill[=0]}} |=> {{put[=8]} && {end[=0]}}) forall N: 1..8: AG within(write_start & size=N, LAST) {gx_start[=N]} Contrast to verbosity of some other languages

5. Advantage 4 – Well defined semantics Semantics are well defined formal document distributed to group Elegant semantics semantics document is only 6 pages long contrast with lengthy, complicated semantics of other languages

6. Advantage 5 – Known efficient algorithms Known model checking algorithms CTL model checking well-known Translation of regular expressions to automata well-known Contrast with other languages in which algorithms are not known Efficient model checking algorithms CTL model checking is well known to be efficient See also various publications by HRL on various optimizations and new algorithms

7. Advantage 6 – Safety on-the-fly Known algorithms for finite time reasoning: Static: on-the-fly model checking of Sugar see HRL publications Dynamic: FoCs see HRL publications Contrast to languages in which algorithms are not known

8. Advantage 7 – Declarative language Declarative, so specification can be easily read Contrast with functional languages in which specification is hard to decipher

9. Advantage 8 – Existential reasoning AG EF (state = idle) AG (frame_fall -> E[IRDY U !TRDY]) Contrast with other languages in which this essential feature is missing

10. Advantage 9 – Built-in syntactic sugar Built-in syntactic sugar means specifications can be easily read Contrast with sugaring through templates in some other languages: confusion can result from two specifications using same template name for different functionality

11. Advantage 10 – Hardware clocks Practical support hardware clocks: AG (hipri -> next_event(enable)(grant))::clk=clka