Lola was designed as a simple, easily learnable hardware description
language for describing synchronous, digital circuits. In addition to its
use in a digital design course for second year computer science students
at ETH Zürich, the Institute for Computer Systems uses it as a hardware
description language for describing hardware designs in general and
coprocessor applications in particular.
The purpose of Lola is to statically describe the structure and functionality
of hardware components and of the connections between them. A Lola
text is composed of declarations and statements. It describes the hardware
on the gate level in the form of signal assignments. Signals are combined
using operators and assigned to other signals. Signals and the respective
assignments can be grouped together into types. An instance of a type is a
hardware component. Types can be composed of instances of other types,
thereby supporting a hierarchical design style and they can be generic
(e.g. parametrizable with the word-width of a circuit).
The software is available as a tar gzipped file or as an Oberon AsciiCoded file