A hardware design system based on object-oriented principles

Abstract

Most hardware description languages and their environments are either based on imperative language concepts or on functional language concepts. The authors propose a hardware specification and simulation environment based on object-oriented principles. Object-oriented concepts such as classes, objects, inheritance and abstraction are considered in a design environment with the HiFi hardware design model as its underlying basis. The model uses single token Petri nets and applicative state transitions to describe the functionality and data flow of a VLSI network.<>