Abstracting HW Communications with Channels for HDLRuby

Abstract

HDLRuby is an extensible hardware description language (HDL) created for improving the productivity of hardware (HW) designers. This paper presents an extension of the language with channels that decouple computation from communication and allow reusing components without modifying their HW description. As experiments, three data transmission protocols have been implemented as channels and seamlessly interchanged for the communication of HW components.