Bifrodie;st: Creating Hardware with Building Blocks

Paper in proceeding, 2023

Domain-specific hardware design has become increasingly attractive as single-Thread performance improvement has drastically slowed down. At the same time, it is clear that traditional hardware design approaches are difficult and error-prone. In this paper we describe a hardware design language, Bifrodie;st, aimed at allowing clear, correct, and modular specification of hardware. Bifrodie;st is tightly integrated into the Thor system, and thus a design in Bifrodie;st can be refined in a correctness-preserving way to a realistic hardware implementation. This paper gives both syntax and semantics of the language, highlights important design decisions, and illustrates its use in several projects. copy; 2023 IEEE.