X-Nico

7 unusual facts about hardware description language


Hardware description language

A hardware description language enables a precise, formal description of an electronic circuit that allows for the automated analysis, simulation, and simulated testing of an electronic circuit.

SystemC is an example of such—embedded system hardware can be modeled as non-detailed architectural blocks (blackboxes with modeled signal inputs and output drivers).

A hardware description language looks much like a programming language such as C; it is a textual description consisting of expressions, statements and control structures.

Annapolis Micro Systems, Inc.'s CoreFire Design Suite and National Instruments LabVIEW FPGA provide a graphical dataflow approach to high-level design entry and languages such as SystemVerilog, SystemVHDL, and Handel-C seek to accomplish the same goal, but are aimed at making existing hardware engineers more productive versus making FPGAs more accessible to existing software engineers.

Depending on the physical technology (FPGA, ASIC gate array, ASIC standard cell), HDLs may or may not play a significant role in the back-end flow.

Companies such as Cadence, Synopsys and Agility Design Solutions are promoting SystemC as a way to combine high level languages with concurrency models to allow faster design cycles for FPGAs than is possible using traditional HDLs.

The netlist output can take any of many forms: a "simulation" netlist with gate-delay information, a "handoff" netlist for post-synthesis place and route, or a generic industry-standard EDIF format (for subsequent conversion to a JEDEC-format file).


JHDL

JHDL (Just-Another Hardware Description Language) is a low-level structural hardware description language, focused primarily on building circuits via an Object Oriented approach that bundles collections of gates into Java objects.


see also

Don't-care term

In the VHDL hardware description language such values are denoted (in the standard logic package) by the letter "X" (forced unknown) or the letter "W" (weak unknown).