From arrows to netlists describing hardware

Abstract

This paper describes how to transform a functional domain specific langauge (DSL) into hardware represented by a netlist. In earlier papers we proposed the usage of an algebraic structure called "arrows" (basically an abstraction of Haskell's higher-order type (→) for describing DSLs. This structure forms the basis of a novel concept that gives the developer a tool at hand to describe hardware functionally in a natural way. Aside of that an arrow provides not only a tool to synthesize, but to verify and reason about the input DSL. We have taken this concept to the next stage, from a static size length arrow into a fixed size length vector arrows fitting much better to logic gates with a fixed number of in- and output pins. There are many sound possibilities to use the algebraic arrow data structure to model hardware. This paper presents some of them which showed to be most useful. A simple example, the implementation of a cyclic redundancy check (CRC) algorithm, is used to illustrate the presented techniques. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.