A Logic Based Hardware Development Environment

This paper presents a logic based approach to hardware abstraction and composition based on the logic programming language Prolog. This is an attempt to satisfy the dual requirement of abstract hardware design and hardware efficiency. Central to this approach is a hardware description environment called HIDE, which provides more abstract and elegant hardware descriptions and compositions than are possible in traditional hardware description languages such as VHDL or Verilog. The environment enables highly scaleable and parameterised composition of blocks using a small set of constructors e.g. ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ for 2D circuit abstractions and the novel ‘above’ constructor for 3D circuit compositions. It also generates pre-placed configurations in EDIF (and VHDL) format for Xilinx FPGAs.