Jason (jcreed) wrote,
Jason
jcreed

There's some really neat hardware research out of Berkeley in the last few years, speaking as someone who's often wistfully wished he knew more about VLSI design, but who has taken one look at verilog and run screaming in the other direction very fast.

Check it out: Firrtl is a low-level-ish intermediate language that compiles to Verilog, that can be specified in like 50 pages of reasonably readable spec. More to the point, they describe it as a series of increasingly-low-level intermediate languages --- but all you have to do to get one from the next is just forbid one feature after another. And then Chisel is a scala DSL that compiles to Firrtl; so if you want a legit programming language with a modern (if a bit maddeningly everything-but-the-kitchen-sink) type system in which to express the computation of the circuit you're interested in, there you go. You need a tutorial? Got one. You need an entire open-source RISC-V processor implementation? Bam.

Best as I can understand it, Verilog corresponds mushily to both these levels of abstraction at the same time in confusing ways, and that's why it scares the heebie-jeebies out of PL nerds like me.
Tags: hardware
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