hardcaml VS qucs_s

title: Accelerating zk-SNARKs - MSM and NTT algorithms on FPGAs with Hardcaml

Any reason the title deviates so much from original? Is it because of all the cool acronyms and code words? Here's a decoder:

zk-SNARK: zero-knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge

MSM: Multi-Scalar Multiplication

Hardcaml: OCaml lib for hardware: https://github.com/janestreet/hardcaml

NTT: Number Theoretic Transform

Perhaps peripheral (the original site has been hugged to death).

Both clashlang: https://clash-lang.org/

And Hardcaml: https://github.com/janestreet/hardcaml

have personally fueled my interest in hardware.

Dan Luu speaks eloquently and at length about how better options are needed for logic design. I would recommend both of the above to the enthusiastic novice.

Join JS and you can program FPGAs in a strongly typed, expressive, high level programming language (OCaml): https://github.com/janestreet/hardcaml

[1] https://github.com/janestreet/hardcaml

> You can put all the functions/tasks you want in that module.

Coming from a software background, the testing strategies available in Verilog seem very clunky and overly verbose. In comparison, Hardcaml's ASCII waveform expect-test solution feels extremely elegant and simple: https://blog.janestreet.com/using-ascii-waveforms-to-test-ha....

> And all of my development and that of my team happens through gitlab-CI.

That's probably more of a gap in my education than a fault of the ecosystem then.

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Among other qualities, I prefer languages that let fewer mistakes slip through, and allow the developer to focus on the system they intend to build rather than avoiding bugs/misunderstandings that would be easy to catch otherwise. You bring up a lot of really good points, and I suspect that if we were doing Verilog "the right way", we would have probably run into fewer issues. But at the end of the day, developing in Hardcaml was a much more ergonomic experience: testing was straightforward, most "stupid mistakes" were impossible, setup was pretty easy, and the library provided a lot of really useful abstractions. For example, Hardcaml interfaces make it easy to represent practically any data structure that can be serialized to/from a bit vector, and the Always API allows for some pretty interesting non-trivial functional logic.

https://github.com/janestreet/hardcaml/blob/master/docs/hard...

A few months ago, I came across the Signals and Threads Programmable Hardware episode. I really liked the idea of Hardcaml: a library to write and test hardware designs in OCaml. Representing circuits as functions felt like a good abstraction, and I’ve been wanting to learn OCaml for a while.

When talking about open source tools, here are some:

KiCad may be used as a schematic entry tool for ngspice, especially for discrete or PCB-based electronics. You may watch several simulation examples (including oscillators) here: https://forum.kicad.info/t/simulation-examples-for-kicad-ees.... KiCad integrates ngspice internally, but may also provide external ngspice with netlists for simulation.

Another GUI to ngspice is XSCHEM, especially useful for IC design work (see https://xschem.sourceforge.io/stefan/index.html). Device models are available by the Open Source PDKs from Google/Skywater, Google/GF, or IHP. A growing community is supporting digital, analog or mixed-signal design flows.

QUCS-S (https://ra3xdh.github.io/) is a GUI for ngspice or XyCE.

Indeed device models have to be added manually to the devices in the circuit schematic, when invoking ngspice via KiCad or QUCS-S, except for some basic devices with integrated models. Models are provided by device makers, distributors or web sites like this one: https://ngspice.sourceforge.io/modelparams.html .

https://ra3xdh.github.io/ (QUCS-S - seems to be active)

​https://ra3xdh.github.io/

https://ra3xdh.github.io

It's still missing a comprehensive component library like LTspice does, though.

KiCad can also simulate circuits through NGSpice, but it's missing a library and suffers from a lot of quirks.

Also see Qucs-S, which is a GUI for ngspice and a few other engines.

https://ra3xdh.github.io/

Try https://github.com/ra3xdh/qucs\s)