CONLAN (CONsensus LANguage) is a general formal language construction mechanism for the description of hard- and firmware at different levels of abstraction. It has been developed by the international CONLAN Working Group. Members of the CONLAN language family are derived from a common root language called BCL (Base ConLan). This language provides the basic object types and operations to describe the behavior and the structure of digital systems in space and time. The paper is based on the CONLAN Draft Report (in print). The purpose of the paper is (1) to provide an informal introduction to the Draft Report version of BCL together with examples of its application (2) to outline some work on the derivation of languages from BCL and (3) to describe status and further plans for software tools supporting language derivation and implementation.

Computer description languages can be used as input to software tools which aid in the design of digital hardware structures. One of the important phases in the design process is verification. A software system is described which aids the verification process of a computer description at the register transfer language (RTL) leveL. It is based on the concept of concurrent simulation and comparison of the functional and the structural description of a computer. Error types, in particular consistency and semantic errors, and algorithms for their detection are discussed. The tools necessary to implement these detection procedures are outlined.