Kernel Ada to unify hardware and software design

Abstract

This paper is a call to SIGAda members to make a determined thrust to broaden Ada usage in the commercial world. More specifically, we wish to exploit an opportunity in the Electronic Design Automation industry (EDA) to use (a kernel of) Ada as a hardware description language (HDL) for the design and programming of today's System On a Chip (SOC). The Ada subset referred to in this paper is intended for the EDA domain to solve practical problems as an HDL, and, in addition, as the interfacing programming language used for testing and simulations (a market currently dominated by C/C++). Simplicity can be a significant aid in penetrating the market of users and makers of EDA tools. This community consists mostly of electrical engineers and tool manufacturers who would have both a cultural orientation and a commercial interest in a simple kernel of Ada.We use examples to illustrate the appropriateness of Kernel Ada for the development and testing of reusable hardware components.

Making alive register transfer level and transaction level modeling in Ada

“…With SigAda's project [2], RTL design, software parts of a design, and software for design test and verification can all be done in the same language and environment.…”

“…In addition, sequential components are registers and counters (Table 1). SigAda's project in 1998 [2] proved that Ada83 could be used as a hardware description language. Since we are using Ada95 to describe hardware at TLM, we have used this version of Ada to develop a package called UT_Ada_HDL to provide RTL designers with the required primitives.…”