KBS flowHDL®
Introduction to flowHDL
flowHDL® is a product that I was involved in conceiving and architecting, as well as managing the company and its development team (see my Bio for more information on my work history)--which numbered as many as 25 hardware and software engineers during the company's zenith. In 1995, the company's core EDA tool assets (including flowHDL and blockHDL) were acquired by another company as part of an overall majority acquisition of the company. KBS continued to develop the products until 1997, and continued to provide support for key users until early 1999.
At present, the tools are not supported; however, they are being used at University of South Carolina as vehicles for teaching high-level design-for-synthesis, VLSI design, HDL-based programming and SoC systems architecture analysis (coupled with logic synthesis and VHDL/Verilog simulation). To Read More... and access Manuals and Resources, go here. The get directly to the hyperlinked flowHDL v2.2 Manuals, go here and include this link in your browser favorites.
Background of the Algorithmic State Machine (ASM) Notation
flowHDL Configuration and Set-up
The flowHDL® software is available by going the the KBS website and requesting an evaluation copy of the software. Once an evaluation request is made, the company generally forwards these to me, and I have the ability to issue an appropriate license (based on the Highland Software license manager scheme). www.kbscorp.com/eda
The flowHDL® Users and Reference Manuals can be accessed here, either as a set of PDF files, or as a set of web pages (as above). Since flowHDL® doesn't have an integrated help system as such, I'd recommend you save the link to this User's and Reference Manual Page and keep a browser up while running flowHDL®. In addition, there are a number of design examples in the directory structure of the flowHDL installation, some of which are described by Application Notes provided as links on this website.
Unix Environment Variables - flowHDL's basic C shell script for execution on Unix/Solaris can be accessed here (Unix .csh file). This should be customized for your directory path, and also to include the Printer name to which you will use for printing. Consult the printer naming conventions for the various CSE or EE labs (see your respective sysadmin for this information). Get the file from the path /usr/local/etc/flowHDL.csh and copy it into your $HOME directory. Or, take mine and modify it - get flowHDL.csh here. Remember, to run it under Unix under the C shell, you run the command "source flowHDL.csh". Consult the Unix man pages for more information.
Unix Display Symbol Settings - flowHDL's X-windows key bindings (XkeysymDB file) which is required in order for all of the key bindings to work. This file must be placed in the hard coded path /usr/lib/X11 on your Unix machine. For the CSE department, this directory is located on each local Sun Blade workstation, and you must have Root privileges to set this up. If you need to run flowHDL or blockHDL on a workstation for which this path file has not been set up, download this file and contact your respective sysadmin to make the change. Get the XkeysymDB file here.