WG211/M11ODonnell

Generating Debuggers and Fast Simulators from Functional Circuit Specifications by John O'Donnell

Functional hardware specifications can be executed directly to simulate a digital circuit. However, a straightforward execution leaves much to be desired: it's difficult to probe the running simulated circuit, the execution speed isn't very fast, and it's difficult to target specialised parallel platforms. These problems are being addressed by work in progress on the Hydra hardware description language, which generates interactive simulators for debugging and very efficient parallel simulators for large circuits.