Generating Netlists from Executable Circuit Specifications
Proceedings of the 1992 Glasgow Workshop on Functional Programming
Synchronous digital circuits as functional programs
ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
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We consider the design of a circuit description library for a pure functional language where circuits are defined as functions and connected together by writing applicative expressions. Just like the return value of any other function in a functional program, the output of a circuit can be bound to a variable and referred to many times. Usually it is the programmer's intention that such references represent sharing of a circuit's output, implying a fanout structure. However, in a pure functional language, references are transparent and the circuit description library can only view finite graph-shaped circuit structures as infinitely expanded regular trees. To overcome this problem, we introduce expressible sharing, a technique in which the programmer expresses the fork-points present in a circuit in the same way that they express other circuit components like and-gates and or-gates. We define a library for circuit description which uses expressible sharing and demonstrate it on a small case-study.