ModHDL: A modular and expandable language for developing synchronous hardware

With each product generation the number of application domains FPGAs are suitable for is increasing. However, the rising complexity of devices and applications induce the need for more abstract and efficient programming languages. Many research projects have already addressed the improvement of hardware description languages (HDLs). Since each resulting work is tied to its own framework, an extension or combination of such to adopt for a specific application is hardly possible. In this work an expandable and modular HDL (modHDL) is presented which has been developed by applying the Language Oriented Programming paradigm. modHDL consists of a set of modular languages, each with its own scope but with a generic interface to combine or extend for specific requirements. We will discuss the base language with three extension languages covering their own application domain. Furthermore, the utilization process of these languages for further extensions is analyzed in order to demonstrate the convenience of modHDL for high-level hardware design.