Bifröst: Creating Hardware With Building Blocks

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, Bifr...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	2023 Forum on Specification & Design Languages (FDL) pp. 1 - 8
Main Authors:	Pope, Jeremy, Seger, Carl-Johan H.
Format:	Conference Proceeding
Language:	English
Published:	IEEE 13-09-2023
Subjects:	handshake protocols Hardware Hardware description language (HDL) Hardware design languages high-level synthesis (HLS) Protocols Semantics Syntactics
Online Access:	Get full text
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Summary:	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, Bifröst, aimed at allowing clear, correct, and modular specification of hardware. Bifröst is tightly integrated into the Thor system, and thus a design in Bifröst 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.
DOI:	10.1109/FDL59689.2023.10272129