
arXiv: 2304.10646
Modular design is a key challenge for enabling large-scale reuse of hardware modules. Unlike software, however, hardware designs correspond to physical circuits and inherit constraints from them. Timing constraints—which cycle a signal arrives, when an input is read—and structural constraints—how often a multiplier accepts new inputs—are fundamental to hardware interfaces. Existing hardware design languages do not provide a way to encode these constraints; a user must read documentation, build scripts, or in the worst case, a module’s implementation to understand how to use it. We present Filament, a language for modular hardware design that supports the specification and enforcement of timing and structural constraints for statically scheduled pipelines. Filament usestimeline types, which describe the intervals of clock-cycle time when a given signal is available or required. Filament enablessafe compositionof hardware modules, ensures that the resulting designs are correctly pipelined, and predictably lowers them to efficient hardware.
FOS: Computer and information sciences, Computer Science - Programming Languages, Hardware Architecture (cs.AR), Computer Science - Hardware Architecture, Programming Languages (cs.PL)
FOS: Computer and information sciences, Computer Science - Programming Languages, Hardware Architecture (cs.AR), Computer Science - Hardware Architecture, Programming Languages (cs.PL)
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