AUNT: A Universal Netlist Translator

Abstract The declarative nature of electronic-circuit description languages makes them ideally suited to translation by logic programming, and the limited domain of information makes it practical to implement a translator which operates on the logical form (the “meaning” of the circuit), rather than one which simply recognizes patterns in syntactic structures. Because creation of the logical form is independent of the target language, and this logical form is decoupled from the source language from which it was created, AUNT implements a large number of virtual translators among the universe of circuit description languages. AUNT can thus make any VLSI/CAD system an open system, allowing designs to be transferred between diverse sets of tools.