Register transfer level

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In integrated circuit design, Register Transfer Level (RTL) description is a way of describing the operation of a synchronous digital circuit. In RTL design, a circuit's behavior is defined in terms of the flow of signals (or transfer of data) between hardware registers, and the logical operations performed on those signals.

Register transfer level abstraction is used in hardware description languages (HDLs) like Verilog and VHDL to create high-level representations of a circuit, from which lower-level representations and ultimately actual wiring can be derived.

[edit] RTL description

Example of a simple circuit with a toggling output. The inverter forms the combination logic in this circuit, and the register holds the state.

A synchronous circuit consists of two kinds of elements: registers and combinational logic. Registers (usually implemented as D flip-flops) synchronize the circuit's operation to the edges of the clock signal, and are the only elements in the circuit that have memory properties. Combinational logic performs all the logical functions in the circuit and it typically consists of logic gates.

For example, a very simple synchronous circuit is shown in the figure. The inverter is connected from the output of a register to the register's input, to create a circuit that changes its state on each clock edge. In this circuit, the combinational logic consists of the inverter.

When designing digital integrated circuits with a hardware description language, the designs are usually engineered at a higher level of abstraction than transistor or gate level. In HDLs the designer declares the registers (which roughly corresponds to variables in computer programming languages), and describes the combination logic by using constructs that are familiar from programming languages such as if-then-else and arithmetic operations. This level is called register transfer level. The term refers to the fact that RTL focuses on describing the flow of signals between registers.

As an example, the circuit mentioned above can be described in VHDL as follows:

process(clk)
begin
        if rising_edge(clk) then
                Q <= not Q;
        end if;
end process;

Using an EDA tool for synthesis, this description can usually be directly translated to an equivalent hardware implementation files for an ASIC or an FPGA. The synthesis tool performs also logic optimization.

At the register transfer level, some types of circuits can be recognized. If there is a cyclic path of logic from a register's output to its input (or from a set of registers outputs to its inputs), the circuit is called a state machine or can be said to be sequential logic. If there are logic paths from a register to another without a cycle, it is called a pipeline.

[edit] RTL in the circuit design cycle

RTL is used in the logic design phase of the integrated circuit design cycle.

An RTL description is usually converted to a gate-level description of the circuit by a logic synthesis tool. The synthesis results are then used by placement and routing tools to create a physical layout.

Logic simulation tools may use a design's RTL description to verify its correctness.