ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a common description language, called Register Transfer Language (RTL). This language describes the operation of a circuit using micro-instructions. A collection of these micro-instructions is often called a micro-program. The terms micro-instruction and micro-program are a little misleading to someone with a background in computer science. The tendency for a computer scientist is often to think of micro-instructions as, somehow, representing executable code. RTL descriptions are composed of micro-instructions. A micro-instruction is composed of two parts: circuit control and data-path specification. Reverse engineering is the process of generating a high-level description from a low-level description. It is considered to be fairly difficult to automate this process. Behavioral descriptions are usually considered higher level than structural descriptions. The name arithmetic shift emphasizes that a shift can be, and is being used to perform arithmetic. Shifting left is an easy way to perform multiplication.
