Abstract

. We suggest that the productivity of FPGA users can be improved by adopting design libraries which are optimally implemented, rich in variety, easy to use, compatible with incremental development techniques and carefully validated. These requirements motivate our research into a framework for developing FPGA libraries involving the industrial-standard VHDL language and the declarative language Ruby. This paper describes the main elements in our framework, and illustrates its application to the Xilinx 6200 series FPGAs. 1 Introduction FPGA users often face a dilemma. The advance in microprocessor and custom hardware technologies is increasing the pressure for improving functionality and performance of FPGA-based implementations; such improvements, however, may necessitate the use of low-level, device-specific FPGA features, thus lengthening design cycles and reducing the opportunity for design reuse. The productivity of FPGA users can be greatly enhanced by having library elements -- ...

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