Hardware Description Languages: Voices from the Tower of Babel*

A hardware description language can be used to describe the logic gates, the sequential machines, and the functional modules, along with their interconnection and their control, in a digital system. In a general sense, Boolean equations, logic diagrams, programrning languages, and Petri nets are hardware description languages: they can be used to describe some aspect of hardware and they have definable syntax and semantics. Specifically, what is more commonly referred to as a hardware description language is a variation of a programming language tuned to the overall needs of describing hardware. This article will discuss the rationale for using such languages in the first place, identify the problems attendant upon their proliferation, and describe the measures being taken to achieve a solution.