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Lava: hardware design in Haskell

Authors:

Per Bjesse,

Koen Claessen,

Mary Sheeran, and

Satnam SinghAuthors Info & Claims

ICFP '98: Proceedings of the third ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming

September 1998

Pages 174 - 184

https://doi.org/10.1145/289423.289440

Published: 29 September 1998 Publication History

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Abstract

Lava is a tool to assist circuit designers in specifying, designing, verifying and implementing hardware. It is a collection of Haskell modules. The system design exploits functional programming language features, such as monads and type classes, to provide multiple interpretations of circuit descriptions. These interpretations implement standard circuit analyses such as simulation, formal verification and the generation of code for the production of real circuits.Lava also uses polymorphism and higher order functions to provide more abstract and general descriptions than are possible in traditional hardware description languages. Two Fast Fourier Transform circuit examples illustrate this.

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Cited By

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Jang MRhee JLee WZhao SKang J(2024)Modular Hardware Design of Pipelined Circuits with HazardsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36563788:PLDI(28-51)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3656378
Bourgeat TClester IErbsen AGruetter SSingh PWright AChlipala A(2023)Flexible Instruction-Set Semantics via Abstract Monads (Experience Report)Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36078337:ICFP(108-124)Online publication date: 31-Aug-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3607833
Colaço JPauget BPouzet MHenriksen TSinkarovs A(2023)Polymorphic Types with Polynomial SizesProceedings of the 9th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Libraries, Languages and Compilers for Array Programming10.1145/3589246.3595372(36-49)Online publication date: 6-Jun-2023
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Lava: hardware design in Haskell

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Reviews

Reviewer: Josep Silva

Hardware design languages have been continuously increasing their abstraction levels over the last 20 years, and languages such as very high speed integrated circuit hardware description language (VHDL) and Verilog have become standards in the field. These languages lack a formal basis, however, which is needed, for instance, to formally verify designed circuits. Nowadays, Haskell (see http://www.haskell.org) is the most important pure functional language. Its strong mathematical foundation (it is based on lambda calculus) makes it a very convenient language to perform formal verification of programs. In this work, the authors describe the hardware design language, Lava, that has been embedded into Haskell. The authors describe how Lava takes advantage of many features of Haskell, such as monads or type classes, to completely describe hardware circuits, and how many existing tools, such as theorem provers (which allow users to perform formal verification of circuits), can be used with Lava. The paper is well written, and clearly explains the advantages and properties of Lava using many examples. Although some related work is described, the authors only mention a short comment about Hawk [1], another language embedded in Haskell, which uses a very similar approach to hardware specification. A more detailed comparison between them would have been very interesting. Finally, Lava has become the core of Claessen's Ph.D. thesis [2], so I refer the interested reader to this document for a more detailed explanation about Lava. Online Computing Reviews Service

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Published In

ICFP '98: Proceedings of the third ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming

September 1998

351 pages

ISBN:1581130244

DOI:10.1145/289423

Chairmen:
Matthias Felleisen
Rice Univ., Houston, TX
,
Paul Hudak
Yale Univ., New Haven, CT
,
Christian Queinnec
Univ. Paris 6; and INRIA

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 34, Issue 1
Jan. 1999
357 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/291251
Chairmen:
Matthias Felleisen
Rice Univ.
,
Paul Hudak
Yale Univ.
,
Editor:
A. Michael Berman
Issue’s Table of Contents

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 29 September 1998

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Conference

ICFP98

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SIGPLAN

ICFP98: 1998 International Conference on Functional Programming

September 26 - 29, 1998

Maryland, Baltimore, USA

Acceptance Rates

ICFP '98 Paper Acceptance Rate 30 of 77 submissions, 39%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 333 of 1,064 submissions, 31%

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ICFP '24

Sponsor:
sigplan

29th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming

September 2 - 7, 2024

Milan , Italy

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Jang MRhee JLee WZhao SKang J(2024)Modular Hardware Design of Pipelined Circuits with HazardsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36563788:PLDI(28-51)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3656378
Bourgeat TClester IErbsen AGruetter SSingh PWright AChlipala A(2023)Flexible Instruction-Set Semantics via Abstract Monads (Experience Report)Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36078337:ICFP(108-124)Online publication date: 31-Aug-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3607833
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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3589246.3595372
Han SJang MKang JAamodt TJerger NSwift M(2023)ShakeFlow: Functional Hardware Description with Latency-Insensitive Interface CombinatorsProceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, Volume 210.1145/3575693.3575701(702-717)Online publication date: 27-Jan-2023
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Pizani Flor JSwierstra W(2022)Verified Technology Mapping in an Agda DSL for Circuit DesignProceedings of the 34th Symposium on Implementation and Application of Functional Languages10.1145/3587216.3587217(1-13)Online publication date: 31-Aug-2022
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Christensen MTzimpragos GKringen HVolk JSherwood THardekopf BJhala RDillig I(2022)PyLSE: a pulse-transfer level language for superconductor electronicsProceedings of the 43rd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation10.1145/3519939.3523438(671-686)Online publication date: 9-Jun-2022
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Huang LGao TLi DWang ZWang K(2021)A Highly Configurable High-Level Synthesis Functional Pattern LibraryElectronics10.3390/electronics1005053210:5(532)Online publication date: 25-Feb-2021
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Shahmohammadian MMainland GTilevich EDe Roover C(2021)Metaprogramming with combinatorsProceedings of the 20th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Generative Programming: Concepts and Experiences10.1145/3486609.3487198(43-54)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2021
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