Sublanguages for generating digital circuits

John O'Donnell

Functional circuit specification constitutes a natural domain specific language: circuits are modelled as functions, and an entire hardware description language can be embedded in a functional programming language. This approach is general, but some aspects of circuit design are best described outside the general framework. Two examples are the generation of control circuits from control algorithms, and the specification of layout through a combination of functional geometry and schematic capture. Approaches for integrating such tools into a hardware description language are compared.