3. Language diversification

During the 1970s, HDLs proliferated, leading to the creation in 1975 of the CHDL conference (until 1997) and the setting up of an international standardization group, the CONLAN group (for CONsensus LANguage), both under the aegis of IFIP (International Federation of Information Processing Societies). In France, the ESTEREL synchronous language was designed in 1975 at the École des Mines. It's not an HDL, but synchronous languages are now being applied to integrated circuit design, now that they also integrate the system on a chip. CASSANDRE has been extended to a higher level of abstraction, called LASCAR, by adding arithmetic operations and conversion functions for arithmetic operations and conversion functions for switching from bit vectors to integers and vice versa.

Since 1997, this notion has been standardized in VHDL (packages 1076.3 numeric-bit and numeric-std)....