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Lava: hardware design in Haskell

Authors:

Per Bjesse,

Koen Claessen,

Mary Sheeran,

Satnam SinghAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 34, Issue 1

Pages 174 - 184

https://doi.org/10.1145/291251.289440

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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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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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

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

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

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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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 29 September 1998

Published in SIGPLAN Volume 34, Issue 1

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3609703.3609714
Mordido ASpaderna JThiemann PVasconcelos V(2023)Parameterized Algebraic ProtocolsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/35912777:PLDI(1389-1413)Online publication date: 6-Jun-2023
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