Ada-to-silicon compiler study (Final Report 30 Jan 85 - 30 Jun 86)

The vision of a system design environment in which both hardware and software components could be designed, tested, and executed was proffered by the late Dr. Elliott Organick1 in 1981. He was impressed by the objectiveness of Ada and the availability of an architecture (the Intel 432) which was specifically tailored to the execution of the Ada language. He noted that, in order to correctly build (with the aid of compilers) a system composed of hardware and software components, the specification of both hardware and software must be driven by the same language semantics. In addition, a consistent language syntax is required if a uniform system design methodology is to span both hardware and software [26].