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+---
+layout: docs
+title:  "Motivation"
+section: "chisel3"
+---
+
+# Motivation -- "Why Chisel?"
+
+We were motivated to develop a new hardware language by years of
+struggle with existing hardware description languages in our research
+projects and hardware design courses.  _Verilog_ and _VHDL_ were developed
+as hardware _simulation_ languages, and only later did they become
+a basis for hardware _synthesis_.  Much of the semantics of these
+languages are not appropriate for hardware synthesis and, in fact,
+many constructs are simply not synthesizable.  Other constructs are
+non-intuitive in how they map to hardware implementations, or their
+use can accidentally lead to highly inefficient hardware structures.
+While it is possible to use a subset of these languages and still get
+acceptable results, they nonetheless present a cluttered and confusing
+specification model, particularly in an instructional setting.
+
+However, our strongest motivation for developing a new hardware
+language is our desire to change the way that electronic system design
+takes place.  We believe that it is important to not only teach
+students how to design circuits, but also to teach them how to design
+*circuit generators* ---programs that automatically generate
+designs from a high-level set of design parameters and constraints.
+Through circuit generators, we hope to leverage the hard work of
+design experts and raise the level of design abstraction for everyone.
+To express flexible and scalable circuit construction, circuit
+generators must employ sophisticated programming techniques to make
+decisions concerning how to best customize their output circuits
+according to high-level parameter values and constraints.  While
+Verilog and VHDL include some primitive constructs for programmatic
+circuit generation, they lack the powerful facilities present in
+modern programming languages, such as object-oriented programming,
+type inference, support for functional programming, and reflection.
+
+Instead of building a new hardware design language from scratch, we
+chose to embed hardware construction primitives within an existing
+language.  We picked Scala not only because it includes the
+programming features we feel are important for building circuit
+generators, but because it was specifically developed as a base for
+domain-specific languages.