A hierarchical behavioural description based CAD system

Describes the hierarchical behavioral description language called SFL and its processing system. SFL was developed to aid in the design of the hardware functions and behaviors of ASICs composed solely of clock-synchronized circuits. The main features of SFL are as follows: (1) It is not mixed with connection description, but employs only behavioral description (like procedural description in program language), and it provides hierarchical expression of behavioral description. (2) It permits the description of parallel processing operations by adopting a new hardware task concept. And, (3) it is linked with the behavioral simulator, logic synthesizer, and other components of the processing system. After describing SFL in some detail, a brief explanation of its synthesizer and other processing components is provided, along with its application results in the design of some ASICs.<>