Integrating SDL and VHDL for System-Level Hardware Design

Abstract SDL is a CCITT standard for the specification of distributed software systems. It is widely used mainly in the telecommunication area. Although one goal during the development of SDL was to support the specification and description of communication systems consisting of both hardware and software, SDL is mainly used in the software design process today. One reason why SDL did not gain acceptance among hardware designers might be the big gap between specification and hardware implementation. In the software domain code generators for several programming languages, e.g., CHILL, C, C++, or PASCAL have been made available to close the gap between design and implementation. Similar tools for hardware are missing so far. This paper describes the application of SDL to system-level design of hardware. A translation of SDL descriptions into the standard hardware description language VHDL is presented. This translation allows one to implement SDL descriptions in hardware with state-of-the-art synthesis tools.