An Integrated Logic Design Environment Based on Behavioral Description

This paper describes a new designer environment and its technical features for aiding in several design phases of digital equipment, including architecture, function, and logic design. The author and his coworkers have integrated an editor of a register transfer level (RTL) behavioral language, a translator, a simulator, and evaluation and optimization tools into a single system. In addition, they have developed a hardware synthesizer which automatically produces a gate-level connective description from the RTL behavioral description. With this new environment, designers can more quickly create designs and interactively change design data in the evaluation phase. Using this behavioral-description-based CAD environment, they designed a one-LSI-chip PROLOG machine with 33 independent control parts for executing unification and backtracking algorithms. The machine operates at 130 KLIPS, and is 18 213 gates in size. It took 7.8 person-months to carry out its architecture, function, and logic design.