Three decades of hardware description languages in Europe
J. Mermet, Peter Marwedel, F.-J. Ramming, Newton, C., D. Borrione, C. Lefaou · HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 1998
The paper binds together a collection of short presentations on hardware description languages (HDLs) developed in Europe and provides a view of the history of HDLs during the last three decades (1968-98). This historical review presents the ideas conceived in these previous languages, which are now implemented in the standard languages. Furthermore, the paper highlights those early concepts which still need to be implemented in the evolving standards or could provide a way to unify them (like VHDL, Verilog or SDL) within a formally defined multi-language environment. Among a large number of European works over 3 decades, we have selected a sample from different countries: France, Germany, UK, Italy, which have been implemented and used reliably in various segments of the industry. The selected HDLs are: CASSANDRE (1967), MIMOLA (1977), DACAPO (1977), ELLA (1979), ART (1980), and CASCADE (1981). We have tried to compare the main features of the chosen languages according to a list of criteria and briefly identify those which are still missing in the recognized worldwide standards.