Functional Programming Enabling Flexible Hardware Design at Low Levels of Abstraction
Doctoral thesis, 2008

Continuous down-scaling of sizes in VLSI circuits causes low-level electrical phenomena to become more and more prominent performance stoppers in modern chip technologies. This forces designers to work at a lower level of abstraction than desired in order to gain control over these effects. The most dominating contributors to low-level performance problems are the routing wires, which are used to connect the gates (computational units) on the chip. Hardware description languages (HDLs) – which naturally strive for generality and reusablility – tend to focus on higher levels of abstraction. This means that the low-level effects are not visible and thus very hard to control. To date, we are not aware of any HDL that allows control over the effects of routing wires in a really useful way, so when high-performance is crucial, designers are left to interfacing directly with CAD tools for physical chip design. This thesis presents a flexible wire-aware design system called Wired and shows how it has developed from a preliminary idea to a relatively mature system that can now be tried on real-world challenges. The present Wired builds upon the existing HDL Lava, and extends it with: (a) finer control over geometry, (b) support for geometrical refinement, (c) more accurate performance models, (d) basic wire-awareness, and (e) support for descriptions with abstract signal flow. Wired is implemented in the functional programming language Haskell. It has a simple modular implementation consisting of three separate main components: (1) The Lava library, for representing the structural circuit view, (2) a new monadic library for expressing layout, and (3) a new library for light-weight logical variables. The system is used to improve the accuracy of an algorithm for searching for fast, low-power parallel prefix networks. More experiments are needed in order to reach industrially applicable results, but the main contribution here is the fact that physically aware design exploration is actually achievable at this level of flexibility. Although not yet tested on industrial problems, Wired seems like a very promising system that has a good potential of reducing the effort of generating high-quality layouts of complex circuits.

wire-awareness

hardware design

functional programming

embedded domain-specific languages

EA-salen, EDIT-huset, Chalmers Tekniska Högskola
Opponent: Professor Warren Hunt, Department of Computer Sciences, University of Texas, Austin

Author

Emil Axelsson

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Computing Science (Chalmers)

Wired - a Language for Describing Non-Functional Properties of Digital Circuits

Proceedings of International Workshop on Designing Correct Circuits. Barcelona, Spain, March 2004,; (2004)

Other conference contribution

A Functional-Logic Library for Wired

Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2007 Haskell Workshop. Freiburg, Germany, Sept 2007,; (2007)p. 37-48

Paper in proceeding

Using Lava and Wired for Design Exploration

Proceedings of the sixth international workshop on designing correct circuits, March, Vienna, Mary Sheeran and Tom Melham (editors),; (2006)

Magazine article

Flexible Hardware Design at Low Levels of Abstraction

Proceedings of Designing Correct Circuits,; (2008)

Other conference contribution

Wired: Wire-aware Circuit Description

Proceedings of TECHCON, Semiconductor Research Corporation. Portland, Oregon, Oct 2005,; (2005)

Other conference contribution

A Functional-Logic Library for Wired

Proceedings of International Workshop on Hardware Design and Functional Languages. Braga, Portugal, March 2007,; (2007)p. 95-113

Other conference contribution

Wired: Wire-Aware Circuit Design

Correct Hardware Design and Verification Methods,; Vol. 3725(2005)p. 5-19

Paper in proceeding

Subject Categories

Computer Engineering

Computer Science

Areas of Advance

Information and Communication Technology

ISBN

978-91-7385-147-3

Technical report D - Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology and Göteborg University: 41

Doktorsavhandlingar vid Chalmers tekniska högskola. Ny serie: 2828

EA-salen, EDIT-huset, Chalmers Tekniska Högskola

Opponent: Professor Warren Hunt, Department of Computer Sciences, University of Texas, Austin

More information

Created

10/7/2017