Toward a Standard Hardware Description Language

A hardware description language should be simple, expressive, orthogonal, easy to read, and extendable. It should have associated efficient, user-friendly tools that produce good results, and it should have functional, structural and layout semantics. Zeus satisfies most of these requirements and therefore its features should be included in any HDL proposed as a standard. Zeus and its recent developments¿its close integration with Modula-2 and its implementation in the context of a metaprogramming environment¿are presented here. Two example circuits, a comparator circuit and a music generation circuit, illustrate some essential features of Zeus. A number of CAD tools that will use Zeus are under development, and Zeus has been benchmarked with over 40 design examples.