Meta-Functional Languages for Hardware Design and Verification

The approach of embedding hardware description lan-guages in general-purpose languages has been widely explored in the literature and has been shown to aid hardware design and verification. In this paper we ex-plore the use of a meta-functional language reFLect as a host language for a hardware description language. We show how this approach aids the development, analysis and manipulation of embedded objects, whilst at the same time we keep meta-programming features largely invisible to the hardware designer. We illus-trate the use of these techniques in supporting circuit placement techniques and automatic model checking of hardware compiler invariants