Function of "&" before a variable

[Luiz Gustavo]

What's the function of the "&" in this line:

if (&bit_cnt)
sro <= #1 mem[mem_adr];

Thanks

 

Luiz Gustavo wrote:

What's the function of the "&" in this line:

if (&bit_cnt)
sro <= #1 mem[mem_adr];

It is called a "reduction AND". It is a unary operator that ANDs
together all the bits in a vector to produce a 1-bit result. So it is
basically testing whether all the bits in bit_cnt are 1.