Hardware description languages (HDLs) have established themselves as one of the principal means of designing electronic systems. The interest in and usage of HDLs continues to spread rapidly, driven by the increasing complexity of systems, the growth of HDL-driven synthesis, the research on formal design methods and many other related advances. This research-oriented publication aims to make a strong contribution to further developments in the field. The following topics are explored in depth: BDD-based system design and analysis; system level formal verification; formal reasoning on hardware; languages for protocol specification; VHDL; HDL-based design methods; high level synthesis; and text/graphical HDLs. There are short papers covering advanced design capture and recent work in high level synthesis and formal verification. In addition, several invited presentations on key issues discuss and summarize recent advances in real time system design, automatic verification of sequential circuits and languages for protocol specification.