At the SIGAda '98 conference Sy Wong presented a paper on Kernal Ada for
hardware design.  He has begun a working group whose home page,
http://alpha.fdu.edu/~levine/wong/,  I found in the working group section
of the SIGAda website, http://acm.org/sigada/.

John

At 02:02 PM 11/8/1999 +1100, Geoff Bull wrote:
>"F. Britt Snodgrass" wrote:
>>
>> There have been several articles this year in Electronic Engineering
>> Times dealing with the emerging trend of using conventional software
>> languages for "System on Chip" (SoC) design.
>
>
>For more info see:
>http://www.systemc.org
>http://www.cynapps.com
>
>My personal opinion is that C/C++ (and Ada) are missing vital
>pieces to be successfully used as a HDL (hardware description
>language).
>
>Still, if you are going to take this route (using a non HDL
>to design hardware) the fine control over representation
>found in Ada would be a huge advantage.
>
>
>
>> One of the main arguments given is the
>> availability of large numbers of C and Java developers
>> who could quickly become SoC ASIC designers.
>
>This argument ignores the fact that there
>is much less work in learning VHDL or Verilog than
>in learning hardware design.
>I believe the attraction is that C and Java are essentially free
>while VHDL are Verilog simulation licenses are, in comparison,
>hugely expensive.
>
>> Ada is never mentioned in these articles even
>> though VHDL has some similarity to Ada.
>
>I was originally attracted to Ada because I had learnt
>VHDL and realized how good that language is.
>BTW the VHDL v's Verilog debate is not unlike the
>Ada V's C debate.
>
>Cheers
>Geoff



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John W. McCormick                [log in to unmask]
Computer Science Department      [log in to unmask]
University of Northern Iowa      voice (319) 273-2618
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http://www.cs.uni.edu/~mccormic/