Esterel EDA>News and Events>IEEE Standardization p1778

Esterel v7 Language IEEE Standardization
Project P1778
Information Pack

On 22 March 2007 the IEEE-SA Standards Board approved the project P1778 - Standard for Esterel v7 Language Reference Manual. The project is sponsored by Digital Automation Standards Committee (DASC). A DASC Study group defined the Project Authorization Request and issued the Esterel v7 Standardization Report to DASC which documents the interest of the project regarding IEEE Standards Association criteria.

Scope:

This standard is a Reference Manual for the Esterel v7 Language, which is dedicated to the specification and implementation of hardware or software reactive systems. The standard ensures unambiguous definition of the language syntax and semantics, and, therefore, full interoperability between Esterel-based software compilation, circuit synthesis, static analysis, and verification tools.

Purpose:

The purpose of this standard is to provide the Electronic Design Automation, Semiconductor, Systems Design, and Software communities with a well-defined and official IEEE definition of the Esterel v7 language. Esterel v7 is not a minor variant of existing HDLs or software languages that could be defined with an addendum to existing standards. Esterel v7 is unique in its way to formally merge the kind of sequencing only found in software languages, the kind of large-scale synchronous concurrency found in hardware description languages, specific temporal control primitives that drive the life and death of activities, and full support for multiclock designs. For datapath specification, Esterel v7 supports formally defined arbitrary precision exact arithmetic, bitvectors with conversion from and to numbers according to predefined or user-defined numerical encodings, and arrays of arbitrary dimensions and types. Esterel v7 is interoperable with other standards since it can generate synthesizable HDL code (Verilog, VHDL, etc.) as well as executable software code (C, C++, SystemC, etc.).

In the Press

IEEE Begins Standard for Esterel Reference Manual PISCATAWAY, N.J., USA, 12 April 2007 - The IEEE has begun work on IEEE P1778™ Standard for Esterel v7 Language Reference Manual, a standard that will stabilize and fully define the syntax and semantics of this language …