Esterel on hardware

Esterel is a synchronous concurrent programming language for reactive systems (controllers, protocols, man—machine interfaces, etc.). Esterel has an efficient software implementation based on a well-defined mathematical semantics. I present a new hardware implementation of the pure synchronization subset of the language. Each program generates a specific circuit that responds to any input in one clock cycle. The circuit is shown to be semantically equivalent to the source program. The hardware translation is effectively implemented and used on the programmable active memory Perle0 developed by J. Vuillemin and his group at Digital Equipment.