A declarative approach to incremental custom computing

Incremental methods can be used to produce implementations rapidly and to facilitate multi-level design optimisation. This paper describes a declarative framework, based on the language Ruby, that supports incremental design and validation of custom computers. The key elements of the approach include parameterised descriptions, design transformation and data refinement. Several priority queue designs are employed to illustrate our techniques and the computer-based tools; we also present the use of our framework in producing a priority queue implementation using Algotronix CAL devices.