Dynamic-Language Based System Description, Verification, And Synthesis

With the rapid development of integrated circuit technology, integrated circuits on a single chip contain increasing number of transistors, and appear as more complex system-on-chip (SoC). The design are being changed from the original register transfer level (RTL) to the System-level (ESL), and the resulting system-level design language (SDL) is also becoming available. The language can describe the target at several abstract levels, and it can be basically divided into three broad categories. (1) Extension of the classical hardware description language. (2) Extension of the general-purpose serial language. (3) A completely new design. Among them, SystemC is rapidly gaining wide acceptance as a simulation framework for SoC and embedded processors, and it is becoming a de facto standard.Since the hardware design oriented system-level language and the programming language based software technology are under relatively independent development process, it making SDL unable to absorb the latest software technology development results, to some extent, this limits the development of the efficiency of designers. In recent years, the progressive development of popular dynamic languages (such as Python) has been widely used in a variety of large-scale projects, and has achieved some good result. Software giant Microsoft has also upgraded their software to add support for a variety of dynamic characteristics, such as the new version of C # and the IronPython establishment.The use of these emerging software technologies greatly shortened product development cycle, but how to expand these advantages to the SDL is a challenging task. So this thesis gives a helpful try and exploration on this topic with the popular dynamic language Python. The main points are as follows:(1) Definition of dynamic-system design and Proposal of new design flow. Dynamic system can be defined as a set of dynamic changeable states. It is the core of this paper, the base of system three-stages (description, verification, and synthesis). It is different from the traditional file-based static system.Based on the popular Python language, we have designed a dynamic system-level design language PDSL (Python based Dynamic System Language), users can complete the entire design flow on the dynamic system concept.(2) Design and Implementation for the Description of Dynamic Systems in PDSL. It provides a variety of modeling elements (such as module, data, process, etc.) to build a dynamic system, and provide a variety of mechanisms to dynamically add, delete, modify its structure and behavior.(3) Design and Implementation for the Verification of dynamic systems inPDSL. This section provides a time-based discrete-event-driven simulation engine. In addition, it defines the persistence of dynamical systems management, including serialization and deserialization.(4) Design and Implementation for the Synthesis of dynamic systems inPDSL. The 'current' state set of dynamic system can be transformed into the industry accepted hardware description language description. This includes the matching of data, as well as the process of Python byte code analysis and conversion.(5) Design and Implementation for the Natural-Modeling based high-level synthesis system, Trilobite. Natural modeling refers to a modeling style close to the cognitive and understanding structure of the designers towards target system, its philosophy is to transfer a lot of complexity and hide them inside the system tools. Therefore, we have designed and implemented a high level synthesis system Trilobite, which is a flexible framework and can be expended with a variety of further refinement, translation, optimization to get its corresponding final hardware description.In conclusion, this thesis contains two associated parts.â‘ PDSL (Python based Dynamic System Language), formerly known as the PDSDL (Python based Dynamic System Description Language), which includes the above work 1-4.â‘¡Trilobite is a high-level synthesis framework, built on the basis of PDSL, including the work 5. Through them, we have established a solid base for the application of the dynamic system.Finally, the thesis describes the use of the dynamic language Python, Trilobite, and PDSL in the design of temperature-compensated crystal oscillators. In addition to this non-processor example, the design results of a simple CPU and part of Java processor are also presented.Thanks to Python, Trilobite and PDSL, the dynamic system-level design gives birth to a number of improvements on design methodology, which greatly increase the productivity of developers and help them to reach a higher level of electronic design automation.