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 simple 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 the language. The greater sophistication of these objectoriented data structures eventually finds itself reflected in the greater sophistication of the programs written to manipulate the hardware model during design.