A Hardware Description Language for Processor Based Digital Systems

Abstract

A new HDL (Hardware Description Language) for describing processor modules and support chips is presented in [1][2]. This paper presents a portion of the dissertation and illustrates the effectiveness of the new descriptive technique in describing complex digital systems with example descriptions of the PDP-11 computer system and the 2900 bit-slice components. The examples presented illustrate that the descriptive technique allows functional abstraction not only at the chip interface level (as in the M6800 system description presented in [1][2]) but also at the subsystem (or PCB module) level (as shown in the PDP-11 example). Language modifications and enhancements to increase the power of the language are also presented.