0BJECT-ORIENTED programming has become popoular over the past several years as a practical solution
to the problems of building complex programs. Inheritance
and run-time methods determination help make programs
smaller and more powerful; these features are also
s%ple and efficient enough to be implementable in compilers
and comprehensible to programmers. Since hardware
description languages are closely related to programming
languages, it is natural to try to adapt objectoriented
techniques to hardware description and several
researchers have tried to do so. Our experience shows that
object-oriented programming must be adapted for describing
hardware to take best advantage of the mechanisms
that underlie them. This paper describes our approach
to adapting object-oriented programming
techniques to hardware description and measurement.
A natural application of object-oriented techniques to
CAD is to use objects to represent components, just as
data structures are built and manipulated by CAD programs
to describe a piece of hardware under design. Implementing
the data structures that model the hardware in
object-oriented programming languages allow us to take
advantage of the more powerful mechanisms provided by