Flow to HDL tools and methods convert flow-based system design into a hardware description language

Hardware description language

In electronics, a hardware description language or HDL is any language from a class of computer languages, specification languages, or modeling languages for formal description and design of electronic circuits, and most-commonly, digital logic...

 (HDL) such as VHDL or Verilog

Verilog

In the semiconductor and electronic design industry, Verilog is a hardware description language used to model electronic systems. Verilog HDL, not to be confused with VHDL , is most commonly used in the design, verification, and implementation of digital logic chips at the register-transfer level...

. Typically this is a method of creating designs for field-programmable gate array

Field-programmable gate array

A field-programmable gate array is an integrated circuit designed to be configured by the customer or designer after manufacturing—hence "field-programmable"...

, application-specific integrated circuit

Application-specific integrated circuit

An application-specific integrated circuit is an integrated circuit customized for a particular use, rather than intended for general-purpose use. For example, a chip designed solely to run a cell phone is an ASIC...

 prototyping and DSP

DSP

- Computing :* Digital signal processing, the study and implementation of signals in digital computing and their processing methods* Digital signal processor, a specialized microprocessor designed specifically for digital signal processing...

design. Flow-based system design is well-suited to field-programmable gate array design as it is easier to specify the innate parallelism of the architecture.

History

The use of flow-based design tools in engineering is a reasonably new trend. Unified Modeling Language

Unified Modeling Language

Unified Modeling Language is a standardized general-purpose modeling language in the field of object-oriented software engineering. The standard is managed, and was created, by the Object Management Group...

 is the most widely-used example for software design. The use of flow-based design tools allows for more holistic system design and faster development. C to HDL

C to HDL

C to HDL tools convert C or C-like computer program code into a hardware description language such as VHDL or Verilog. The converted code can then be synthesized and translated into a hardware device such as a field-programmable gate array...

 tools and flow have a similar aim, but with C

C (programming language)

C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....

 or C-like programming language

Programming language

A programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely....

s.

Applications

Most applications are ones which take too long with existing supercomputer architectures. These include bioinfomatics, CFD

Computational fluid dynamics

Computational fluid dynamics, usually abbreviated as CFD, is a branch of fluid mechanics that uses numerical methods and algorithms to solve and analyze problems that involve fluid flows. Computers are used to perform the calculations required to simulate the interaction of liquids and gases with...

, financial processing and oil and gas survey data analysis. Embedded applications that require high performance or real-time data processing are also an area of use. System-on-a-chip

System-on-a-chip

A system on a chip or system on chip is an integrated circuit that integrates all components of a computer or other electronic system into a single chip. It may contain digital, analog, mixed-signal, and often radio-frequency functions—all on a single chip substrate...

 design can also be done using this flow.

Examples

• Xilinx System Generator from Xilinx
• StarBridge VIVA from defunct StarBridge Systems

External links

• http://www.cse.clrc.ac.uk/disco/publications/FPGA_overview_2.0.pdf an overview of flows by Daresbury Labs.
• http://www.xilinx.com/products/design_tools/logic_design/advanced/esl/index.htm Xilinx's ESL initiative, some products listed and C to VHDL tools.

See also

• Application Specific Integrated Circuit
  ASIC
  ASIC may refer to:* Application-specific integrated circuit, an integrated circuit developed for a particular use, as opposed to a customised general-purpose device.* ASIC programming language, a dialect of BASIC...
  
   (ASIC)
• C to HDL
  C to HDL
  C to HDL tools convert C or C-like computer program code into a hardware description language such as VHDL or Verilog. The converted code can then be synthesized and translated into a hardware device such as a field-programmable gate array...
  
  
• Comparison of Free EDA software
• Comparison of EDA Software
  Comparison of EDA software
  Comparison of Electronic Design Automation software-Free and Open Source Software :-Proprietary software:-Comparison of EDA packages:Note: ODB++ support is drawn partly from lists by Artwork Conversion Software and Mentor Graphics...
  
  
• Complex programmable logic device (CPLD)
• ELLA (programming language)
  ELLA (programming language)
  ELLA is a Hardware description language and support toolset. Developed by the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment during the 1980s and 90s.Includes tools to perform:* design transformation* symbolic simulations* formal verification...
  
  
• Electronic design automation
  Electronic design automation
  Electronic design automation is a category of software tools for designing electronic systems such as printed circuit boards and integrated circuits...
  
   (EDA)
• Embedded C++
  Embedded C++
  Embedded C++ is a dialect of the C++ programming language for embedded systems. It was defined by an industry group led by major Japanese central processing unit manufacturers, including NEC, Hitachi, Fujitsu, and Toshiba, to address the shortcomings of C++ for embedded applications...
  
  
• Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)
• HDL
  HDL
  HDL may refer to one of the following:* Hardware description language* High-density lipoprotein, so-called "good cholesterol".* Hong Kong Disneyland, in China.* Les Hurlements d'Léo, an alternative rock band from France.* GE HDL diesel engine...
  
  
• Handel-C
  Handel-C
  Handel-C is a high level programming language which targets low-level hardware, most commonly used in the programming of FPGAs. It is a rich subset of C, with non-standard extensions to control hardware instantiation with an emphasis on parallelism. Handel-C is to hardware design what the first...
  
  
• Icarus Verilog
  Icarus Verilog
  Icarus Verilog is an implementation of the Verilog hardware description language. It supports the 1995, 2001 and 2005 versions of the standard, portions of SystemVerilog, and some extensions....
  
  
• JHDL
  JHDL
  JHDL 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...
  
  
• Lustre (programming language)
• MyHDL
  MyHDL
  MyHDL is a Python based hardware description language .Features of MyHDL include:* The ability to generate VHDL and Verilog code from a MyHDL design....
  
  
• Open source software
• Register transfer notation
  Register transfer notation
  Register Transfer Notation is a way of specifying the behavior of a digital synchronous circuit. An example of high-level RTN is Verilog, and a low-level example is Register Transfer Language....
  
  
• Register transfer level
  Register transfer level
  In integrated circuit design, register-transfer level is a level of abstraction used in describing the operation of a synchronous digital circuit...
  
   (RTL)
• Ruby (hardware description language)
  Ruby (hardware description language)
  Ruby is a hardware description language created around 1990 intended to facilitate the notation and development of integrated circuits....
  
  
• SpecC
• SystemC
  SystemC
  SystemC is a set of C++ classes and macros which provide an event-driven simulation kernel in C++ . These facilities enable a designer to simulate concurrent processes, each described using plain C++ syntax...
  
  
• SystemVerilog
  SystemVerilog
  In the semiconductor and electronic design industry, SystemVerilog is a combined Hardware Description Language and Hardware Verification Language based on extensions to Verilog.-History:...
  
  
• Systemverilog DPI
  SystemVerilog DPI
  SystemVerilog DPI is an interface which can be used to interface SystemVerilog with foreign languages. These Foreign languages can be a C, C++, System C as well as others. DPI's consists of two layers: A SystemVerilog Layer and a Foreign language layer. Both the layers are isolated from each other...
  
  
• VHDL
• VHDL-AMS
  VHDL-AMS
  VHDL-AMS is a derivative of the hardware description language VHDL . It includes analog and mixed-signal extensions in order to define the behavior of analog and mixed-signal systems ....
  
  
• Verilog
  Verilog
  In the semiconductor and electronic design industry, Verilog is a hardware description language used to model electronic systems. Verilog HDL, not to be confused with VHDL , is most commonly used in the design, verification, and implementation of digital logic chips at the register-transfer level...
  
  
• Verilog-A
  Verilog-A
  Verilog-A is an industry standard modeling language for analog circuits. It is the continuous-time subset of Verilog-AMS.Verilog-A was created out of a need to standardize the Spectre behavioral language in face of competition from VHDL , which was absorbing analog capability from other languages...
  
  
• Verilog-AMS
  Verilog-AMS
  Verilog-AMS is a derivative of the Verilog hardware description language. It includes analog and mixed-signal extensions in order to define the behavior of analog and mixed-signal systems. It extends the event-based simulator loops of Verilog/SystemVerilog/VHDL, by a continuous-time simulator,...