Methods and systems for functionally describing a digital hardware design and for converting a functional specification of same into a netlist

Abstract

Disclosed is a hardware design development tool, where in a first step the data flow (,) of the desired hardware design is specified (,) and structured into functions. Then the required control logic (,) is introduced in those functions in order to get a description of the functional behavior of the underlying hardware. Various interconnections or relationships are provided between data flow and control logic, for instance via calls (,) between them. According to the proposed methodological steps, the design is specified (,) by functions depending on variables, wherein the functions contain data flow and control flow information. The functional description is parsed (,) in order to distinguish data flow and control flow information. In particular, at least one local table (,) each entry of which containing the control flow information, and a global table (,) each entry of which containing the data flow information and references to the local table(s), are provided. The development tool allows an automatic generation of a netlist from a high-level functional hardware description. Therefore a slow simulation on the low-level netlist stage is obsolete and the relatively fast simulation of the functional description is sufficient for testing the designed hardware.