chisel VS XiangShan

My first instinct was to ask "Does this play well with CIRCT?" And thankfully they answer that right away in the README.

I'm personally of the opinion that there is a LOT of room for improvement in the hardware design tooling space, but a combination of market consolidation, huge pressure to meet deadlines, and an existing functional pipeline of Verilog/VHDL talent is preventing changes.

That's not to say "Verilog/VHDL are bad", because clearly they've been good enough to support nearly all of the wonderful designs powering today's devices. But it is to say, "the startup scene for hardware will continue to look anemic compared to the SaaS scene until someone gives me all of the niceties I have for building SaaS tools in software."

A huge amount of ideas (and entire designs) start off as software sims, which enables kernel/compiler engineers to start building out support for new hardware before it's manufactured.

There is some interesting work going on at SiFive building hardware with Chisel[1], as well as some interesting work lead by a professor at William and Mary to improve simulations[2].

1: https://www.chisel-lang.org

2: https://github.com/sarchlab/akita

Inspired by Scala. Which can do a whole lot more, and worse. The currently biggest competitor to decades old hardware description languages is a Scala DSL.

Already mentioned Chisel: https://www.chisel-lang.org/

I'm also a hobbyist. There are a number of alternative HDLs out there, and as hobbyists we can deviate more from the mainstream of (System)Verilog and VHDL if we desire, though you'll still need to be able to read them. In the past I've done Verilog, but lately I've been using SpinalHDL and have been really enjoying it. Its close relative Chisel also makes appearances in the RISC-V space.

What are your thoughts on other HDLs like Chisel or BlueSpec when it comes to better type checking?

I started playing with FPGAs and HDLs a couple years ago with no hardware design background (I'm mostly a software architect/engineer) and in the end found that a "higher-level" HDL suited me better.

I chose Chisel (https://www.chisel-lang.org/) an HDL based on Scala (technically a Scala DSL) which can provide many facilities to hardware generation.

I'd highly advise looking into it although also knowing Verilog helps a lot.

But some go further and ask "what if when we add a soldering station on top of it?"

In recent years Chisel HDL, RISC V, and SiFive came out of their architecture group, to name a few.

Are you calling for the government to pick a winner? The Chinese word for this fierce if at times chaotic competition is "juan". It worked for them in EV and PV. The outcome remains to be seen in chips and commercial space launches. But even their mostly (ex-)students-run open source Xiangshan RiscV project https://github.com/OpenXiangShan/XiangShan shows a remarkable level of sophistication.

> Certainly no RISC-V implementations that are in the hands of customers right now do any fusion and it doesn't seem to hurt their ability to match or exceed the performance of similar Arm cores (A55, A72).

You can play around with OpenXianShan though, they have a few fusion targets: https://github.com/OpenXiangShan/XiangShan/blob/master/src/m...

Most of the targets require the same destination, so it won't be able to fuse current codegen. I suppose there is still some time before compilers need to be ready, but it's not that much.

> Perhaps they will provide compiler patches if required.

I hope so, btw t-head seems to be still be trying to upstream XTheadVector: https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc-patches/2024-January/64278...

This is the most advanced open source risc-v implementation I'm awair of: https://github.com/OpenXiangShan/XiangShan

Maybe implement a big feature for a open source design? like vroom or xiangshan.

I did know about XiangShan, but not Aolai. Is it a Linux distribution?

If you are interested in high performance look into vroom , c910 and xianghan, maybe you could adopt one of them.