A Vhdl-93 Hardware Description Browser

This paper describes the design and implementation of the VHDL-93 Hardware Description Browser, which is a tool for the intelligent retrieval of information from VHDL designs. The Browser consists of two UNIX processes: a TCL/TK Graphical User Interface and a Prolog search engine. The GUI elicits queries from the user and submits them to the Prolog search engine via a two-way communication pipe. The search engine satisfies queries by traversing a forest of parse trees corresponding to the associated VHDL designs. The results are then sent to the GUI for posting. Two public-domain tools were used to implement the Browser: SWI-Prolog, chosen for its pattern-matching capabilities and its use as an executable specification language, and TCL/TK for its high-level windowing operations and text-substitution capabilities to allow meta-programming.