System For Composing Hardware Generators (Cornell Univ.)

System For Composing Hardware Generators (Cornell Univ.)

Time Stamp: January 16, 2024 11:45 AM
Source Node: 3064989

A technical paper titled “Correct and Compositional Hardware Generators” was published by researchers at Cornell University.

Abstract:

“Hardware generators help designers explore families of concrete designs and their efficiency trade-offs. Both parameterized hardware description languages (HDLs) and higher-level programming models, however, can obstruct composability. Different concrete designs in a family can have dramatically different timing behavior, and high-level hardware generators rarely expose a consistent HDL-level interface. Composition, therefore, is typically only feasible at the level of individual instances: the user generates concrete designs and then composes them, sacrificing the ability to parameterize the combined design.
We design Parafil, a system for correctly composing hardware generators. Parafil builds on Filament, an HDL with strong compile-time guarantees, and lifts those guarantees to generators to prove that all possible instantiations are free of timing bugs. Parafil can integrate with external hardware generators via a novel system of output parameters and a framework for invoking generator tools. We conduct experiments with two other generators, FloPoCo and Google’s XLS, and we implement a parameterized FFT generator to show that Parafil ensures correct design space exploration.”

Find the technical paper here. Published January 2024 (preprint).

Nigam, Rachit, Ethan Gabizon, Edmund Lam, and Adrian Sampson. “Correct and Compositional Hardware Generators.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.02570 (2024).


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