What is RTL?
Register Transfer Level (RTL) is the most common abstraction level for digital design.
Ehum! Register Transfer Logic (RTL).
Some say toe-ma-toe some say toe-may-toe. :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_transfer_level
Traditionally, RTL sits between behavioral level and gate level. And now there's a lot of marketing buzz about Transaction Level (TL) modeling, which is essentially an object-oriented paradigm for hardware (think of bus transactions as method calls).
The interesting aspect of behavioral and transaction level modeling is there are now tools on the market to synthesize these higher abstraction levels. When will gEDA follow, I wonder?
Though Confluence is an RTL language, it obtains an abstraction level higher than Verilog/VHDL do to its functional programming characteristics (higher-order datatypes, lexical scoping, referential transparency, etc.).
-Tom
