HDL |
In electronics, a hardware description language or HDL is any language from a class of computer languages for formal description of electronic circuits. It can describe the circuit's operation, its design and organization, and tests to verify its operation by means of simulation.
HDLs are standard text-based expressions of the spatial and temporal structure and behaviour of electronic systems. In contrast to a software programming language, HDL syntax and semantics include explicit notations for expressing time and concurrency, which are the primary attributes of hardware. Languages whose only characteristic is to express circuit connectivity between a hierarchy of blocks are properly classified as netlist languages.
HDLs are used to write executable specifications of some piece of hardware. A simulation program, designed to implement the underlying semantics of the language statements, coupled with simulating the progress of time, provides the hardware designer with the ability to model a piece of hardware before it is created physically. It is this executability that gives HDLs the illusion of being programming languages. Simulators capable of supporting discrete-event (digital) and continuous-time (analog) modeling exist, and HDLs targeted for each are available.
It is certainly possible to represent hardware semantics using traditional programming languages such as C++, although to function such programs must be augmented with extensive and unwieldy class libraries. Primarily, however, software programming languages do not include any capability for explicitly expressing time, and this is why they do not function as a hardware description language.
Using the proper subset of virtually any (hardware description or software programming) language, a software program called a synthesizer can infer hardware logic operations from the language statements and produce an equivalent netlist of generic hardware primitives to implement the specified behaviour. This typically (as of 2004) requires the synthesizer to ignore the expression of any timing constructs in the text. The ability to have a synthesizable subset of the language does not itself make a hardware description language.
Designing a system in HDL is generally much harder and more time consuming than writing a software program to do the same thing. Consequently, there has been much work done on automatic conversion of C code into HDL, but this has not reached a high level of commercial success.