METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR THE DESIGN AND SIMULATION OF DIGITAL COMPUTER HARDWARE

摘要

Hardware design development tools are provided. In a first step, the data flow 30 of the desired hardware design is specified (10, 40) and structured into functions. Then, the necessary control logic 31, 32 is introduced into these functions to obtain a description of the functional operation of the underlying hardware. Various connections and relationships are provided between the data flow and the control logic, for example via a call 33 therebetween.;According to the proposed methodological step, the design is specified by functions that depend on the variables (10, 40). Here, the functions include data flow and control flow information. In addition, functional descriptions are parsed 43 to distinguish data flow and control flow information. In particular, there is provided at least one local table 45 in which each entry contains data flow information, and a global table 46 in which each entry contains data flow information and references to local table (s).;The proposed hardware or software development tool allows automatic generation of netlists from high level functional hardware descriptions. Thus, slow simulation at the low level netlist level becomes banal, and relatively fast simulation of functional description is sufficient for testing the designed hardware.