Digital design is a sub-discipline within computer engineering in which specifications and other forms of abstract circuit behavior is turned into a design implementation. Digital design is one of the steps within the standard design cycle of computers and ICs. Traditionally, digital design dealt with gate-level design (register-transfer level), synthesis of HDLs (such as VHDL and Verilog), and IC layout. More recently, digital design has grown to included small microcontrollers, PLDs and soft processors.