Designing application specific circuits with concurrent C# programs

This paper presents an investigation into the possibility of using a regular concurrent programming language for modeling and implementing digital circuits. Some of the reasons for using an existing language include the ability to use existing compilers and analysis tools for circuit design and verification. Another important reason is the ever increasing need to model complete systems that comprise interacting software and hardware in a single framework which facilitates easier migration of sub-components between hardware and software implementations compared to multi-model approaches. To this end we present the design of the Kiwi system which models digital circuits with concurrent programs using a standard library in C# for multi-threaded programming. Kiwi models can be executed using a regular C# compiler. Also, the compiled bytecode can be automatically converted into circuits using our Kiwi hardware synthesis system.