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Modelling of arithmetic circuits

Supervisor

Suitable for

MSc in Advanced Computer Science
Computer Science and Philosophy, Part C
Computer Science, Part B
Computer Science, Part C
Mathematics and Computer Science, Part C

Abstract

This is a project in the specification of hardware, which I expect to make use of functional programming.

There is a great deal of knowledge about ways (that are good by various measures) of implementing standard arithmetic operations in hardware. However, most presentations of these circuits are at a very low level, involving examples, diagrams, and many subscripts, for example these descriptions.

The aim of this project is to describe circuits like this in a higher-level way by using the higher order functions of functional programming to represent the structure of the circuit. It should certainly be possible to execute instances of the descriptions as simulations of circuits (by plugging in simulations of the component gates), but the same descriptions might well be used to generate circuit netlists for particular instances of the circuit, and even to produce the diagrams.