An Embedded Language for the Definition and Refinement of Synchronous Circuits

In memory of my father George Vella SharpHDL is a language for designing, specifying and verifying hard-ware. It is embedded in the object-oriented programming language C# and therefore hardware definitions are treated as first-class objects in the host language. Thus, in developing our hardware objects, we are able to use object-oriented features like polymorphism and inheritance, as well as the various tools developed for C#. Being a structural hardware de-scription language, it provides means to describe circuits by specifying the components and their interconnections. It also supports higher-order circuits, which are referred to as Generic Circuits. These are circuit de-scriptions which take other circuits as their input. The language also allows definition of circuit specification by describing observers expressing safety properties. Observers are circuits that take the inputs and outputs of a circuit under observation and output a singl