POLLUS: A LUSTRE based hardware design environment

This paper presents a high-level hardware design environment called Pollux. A design description is written with the Lustre data-ow language, and used by the diierent Pollux tools to produce the corresponding synchronous circuit or, for example, a simulation program, that can be compiled and executed on a sequential machine. Lustre has been chosen because it is well-suited to hardware description, but it has also been extended to become a full synchronous hardware description language. The rst extension allows the description of a oorplan to be included in a Lustre program. Other extensions (arrays, recursion or parameterized subprograms) have been introduced in order to make simpler the description of large designs, without loosing the primitive advantages of the language, especially precision and clarity. The circuits generated by Pollux are currently used to conngure a Programmable Active Memory, where they can be executed.