Modelling and Simulation of Asynchronous Systems using the LARD Hardware Description Language

P.B. Endecott, S.B. Furber.

Abstract

LARD is a hardware description language which uses CSP-like channel communication to describe the behaviour of asynchronous VLSI systems. This communication abstraction makes LARD a much more productive language for this type of modelling than conventional languages such as VHDL. LARD simulations can be useful for debugging, for performance analysis, and for validating the behavioural model against a corresponding gate-level schematic. The latter requires co-simulation if the model is non-deterministic. The LARD toolkit has been implemented in a very flexible fashion and is readily adapted to other tasks.