BEE: a special-purpose machine for hardware description languages

Abstract

The goal of designing a special-purpose computer is to offer a highly efficient computer-aided environment for circuit simulation using hardware description languages. The suggestion is to have a machine that supports bitstring operations. A bitstring comprises a sequence of bits and must have at least one bit, and is found to be the predominant operation in hardware description languages, yet not a common operation in Pascal-like languages. A special-purpose machine is proposed and its hardware architecture reflects the characteristics of a hardware description language. The main part of this paper deals with the design concepts of the hardware machine, which is derived directly from the run-time requirements of hardware description programs. We start by examining examples of these programs and their operators, then identifying areas which can be improved through the use of hardware. Next, we present the architecture of the machine and bitstring operators that are supported. The instruction format is also presented and some comparisons are made to the reduced instruction set computers. Finally, we study the related works that have been conducted elsewhere. © 1995.