Summary: Designing Arithmetic Digital Circuits via Rewriting­Logic #
Mauricio Ayala­Rinc’on + Reiner W. Hartenstein # Ricardo P. Jacobi §
Carlos H. Llanos ¶ Wander J. de Queroz #
Abstract
In this work we present our current investigation on use of rewriting­logic as a higher abstraction
way to tackle digital design. Rewriting can be used to specify, simulate and even synthesize complex
application specific digital systems, which provides a higher abstraction level than current system level
languages. To illustrate the possibilities of rewriting­logic in the context of regular hardware structures
we describe how to implement di#erent arithmetic operators.
Keywords: Rewriting­logic, high level specification and design of digital circuits.
1 Introduction
The specification of VLSI systems in an abstract level is still an open problem. Last years we have seen
a growing number of users adopting VHDL for logic and register transfer level descriptions. Although
VHDL provides constructions similar to traditional programming languages, it is still not suitable for more
abstract design representations. System level languages based on C, C++ and Java are emerging, that allow
to describe hardware and software modules using the power of high­level programming languages. SpecC
(www.specc.org) and SystemC (www.systemc.org) are probably the most popular ones nowadays. It is a
common approach to describe a system using one of those languages and translate the hardware modules to
VHDL for hardware synthesis [7, 8].
The use of rewriting systems to describe circuits is not a novelty. In recent years some work on applying

Source: Ayala-Rincón, Mauricio - Departamento de Matemática, Universidade de Brasília

Collections: Mathematics