Open-Source Electronic Design Automation

Initial Quest

Modern Hardware Description Languages (HDLs) such as SystemVerilog or VHDL are, due to their sheer complexity, insufficient to transport designs through modern circuit design flows. Instead, each design automation tool lowers HDLs to its own Intermediate Representation (IR). These tools are monolithic and mostly proprietary, disagree in their implementation of HDLs, and while many redundant IRs exists, no IR today can be used through the entire circuit design flow. To solve this problem, we propose the LLHD multi-level IR. LLHD is designed as simple, unambiguous reference description of a digital circuit, yet fully captures existing HDLs. We show this with our reference compiler on designs as complex as full CPU cores. LLHD comes with lowering passes to a hardware-near structural IR, which readily integrates with existing tools. LLHD establishes the basis for innovation in HDLs and tools without redundant compilers or disjoint IRs. For instance, we implement an LLHD simulator that runs up to 2.4x faster than commercial simulators but produces equivalent, cycle-accurate results. An initial vertically-integrated research prototype is capable of representing all levels of the IR, implements lowering from the behavioural to the structural IR, and covers a sufficient subset of SystemVerilog to support a full CPU design.

LLHD: A Multi-Level Intermediate Representation for Hardware Description Languages
Fabian Schueki, Andreas Kurth, Tobias Grosser, Luca Benini
Publication

CIRCT & LLHD - Open Source Project

Together, with SiFive, AMD/Xilinx and many others we meanwhile formed CIRCT, an open-source hardware design project built around MLIR.

Ongoing work

We are currently primarily working on a new simulator called arcilator and a new model-checking framework called circt-bmc for verifying the different dialects in CIRCT.

Members

• Bea Healy
• Luisa Cicolini

in collaboration with Fabian Schueki, Andreas Kurth, Luca Benini, Martin Erhart, and many others.