HDLRuby, a new high productivity hardware description language

This paper presents HDLRuby, a new hardware (HW) description language aiming at increasing the productivity of HW designers. Contrary to state of the art approaches that try to synthesize HW from software-like models of computation, HDLRuby sticks to the register-transfer level whose synthesis results remain unparalleled. The gain in productivity is thence achieved by the introduction of paradigms that prove to be successful with recent software (SW) programming languages, but are independent from the model of computation. For that purpose, the HDLRuby framework has been implemented as a library of Ruby, a SW programming language famous for its high productivity and plasticity. A case study is also presented that shows how HDLRuby makes it possible to describe tedious HW parts using only a few clean lines of code.