The use of Petri nets for modeling pipelined processors

Abstract

A collection of tools that support the construction and analysis of Petri-net models is described. These models are particularly well-suited to modeling hardware systems, such as pipelined processors. The focus is on a subset of the tools that comprise the P-NUT system. The features of the particular Petri-net model used which make the modeling of pipelining easy are highlighted. An example of a pipelined processor of moderate complexity is presented, and extensions needed to model even more complex systems are discussed. The types of analyses need to evaluate pipelined processors effectively are discussed. >