A hardware implementation of pure ESTEREL

esterel is a synchronous concurrent programming language dedicated to reactive systems (controllers, protocols, man-machine interfaces etc.). esterel has an efficient standard software implementation based on well-defined mathematical semantics. We 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. When the source program satisfies some statically checkable dynamic properties, the circuit is shown to be semantically equivalent to the source program. The hardware translation has been effectively implemented on the programmable active memory perle0 developed by J Vuillemin and his group at Digital Equipment.