Hardware Description Languages

Hardware compilation

by Jonathan Bowen

J.P. Bowen, He Jifeng and I. Page, Hardware Compilation, Chapter 10, pages 193-207. In Jonathan P. Bowen (ed.), Towards Verified Systems. Elsevier Science, Real-Time Safety Critical Systems series, volume 2, series editor Hussein Zedan, 1994. ISBN 0-444-89901-4.

An Animatable Operational Semantics of the Verilog Hardware Description Language

by Jonathan Bowen

An Approach to the Specification and Verification of a Hardware Compilation Scheme

by Jonathan Bowen

From Operational Semantics to Denotational Semantics for Verilog

by Jonathan Bowen

Towards a Provably Correct Hardware Implementation of Occam

by Jonathan Bowen

A Study of Hardware Programming from a Compilation Perspective

by Rhodes Brown

[Ph.D. candidacy proposal, 2005]

I propose a systematic review and evaluation of the use of general purpose, high-level programming languages for the... more I propose a systematic review and evaluation of the use of general purpose, high-level programming languages for the design and synthesis of circuit specifications that implement algorithms directly as specialized hardware configurations. Specifically, I propose an examination of the, so-called, semantic gap between the understood features and semantics of popular software programming languages such as C and C++, and the capabilities of programmable logic devices such as FPGAs. A significant amount of research effort has already been devoted to this topic, but it is my belief that this research has generally failed to adequately address certain key issues in both principle and implementation. My research will comprise a study of the theory and practice of programming hardware descriptions, with the aim of providing insights that suggest how to bridge the semantic gap and yield more effective hardware programming techniques.