Application of Constraint Logic Programming for VLSI CAD Tools

This paper describes the application of CLP (constraint logic programming) to several digital circuit design problems. It is shown that logic programming together with efficient constraint propagation techniques is an adequate programming environment for complex real world problems like high level synthesis, simulation, code generation, and memory synthesis. Different types of constraints Boolean, integer, symbolic, structural, and type binding ones are used to express relations between the components of a digital circuit and efficient propagation is achieved by the coroutining mechanism. To deal with the increasing complexity of digital circuits we use HDL’s (hardware description languages) to represent structure and behaviour of circuits.