Design Language Viewpoint—Assessing the Plethora of New Design Languages., also called Rosetta

Electronic News, Nov 1, 1999 by Steven Schulz

Boulder, Colo. -- In the last six months, a remarkable number of new design languages and design language proposals have been introduced into the electronics industry. On the surface, it could appear confusing and perhaps contradictory. I don't see it that way at all. Instead, I look at this phenomenon as a welcome sign that the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry fully understands the immediate and pressing need to move the level of abstraction higher than it's been.

No one would argue that the hardware description languages (HDLs) VHDL and Verilog have served us well for more than 10 years. It's hard to imagine an Internet network infrastructure or the wireless consumer market designed without the support of HDL-based EDA software. We wouldn't have high-speed Internet access, Internet appliances or PCs because the complexity of these devices makes it impossible for handcrafted design. And, that's just a glimpse of what the electronics industry has been able to accomplish with HDLs and EDA software.

Design requirements have changed significantly in the last 10 years. In an attempt to keep pace, we've enhanced our workhorse HDLs, modified them and added extensions to prolong their respective usefulness. It's now time to move beyond HDLs to new but complementary design languages to continue to support the electronics industry's creativity and innovation. Yet, we must ensure that we do not create a redundant HDL syntax, but rather define a new capability that is complementary to our existing HDLs.

Borrowing from the Rosetta Stone's language concepts may be a way to set a consistent direction for an all-inclusive design environment, based on existing and emerging standards for system design. The Rosetta Stone, on display in the British Museum in London, has played a vital role in enabling scientists to translate languages used around the world. Through this mapping process, linguists have been able to understand the semantic meaning embodied in the written word.

Coincidentally, VHDL International's System-Level Design Language (SLDL) is called Rosetta, named, as you might expect, for the Rosetta Stone. The language represents a modern-day effort to map across semantic domains within the electronics-centric systems engineering world. It has borrowed concepts from system-level research efforts across Europe and the United States.

To Rosetta, a system is composed of many views -- digital function, analog behavior, timing, bandwidth or throughput, power consumption and cost. A new design language must support the ability to quickly tradeoff architectures and implementations based on system-wide constraints.

Rosetta has integrated multiple domain theories into a common semantic framework and supports the ability to budget and decompose system-wide constraints across all views of hardware and software. It is a systems language, complementary with both Verilog HDL and VHDL, as well as familiar software programming languages like C, C , Java and emerging design languages like Superlog from Co-Design Automation. It does not compete with any of these, or other design language proposals, since no other language describes declarative design constraints at the system level.

Let's view the number of new design languages and design language proposals as a serious and welcome sign that the electronics industry is indeed moving to a higher level of abstraction.

Steven Schulz is a senior member of the technical staff at Texas Instruments Inc. and former president of the board of directors at VHDL International. Design Language Viewpoint appears monthly in Electronic News.