Calyx: Intermediate Language for Hardware Accelerators

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • calyx

    Intermediate Language (IL) for Hardware Accelerator Generators

  • akita

    A flexible, high-performance, user-friendly computer architecture simulator engine (by sarchlab)

  • 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

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  • chisel

    Chisel: A Modern Hardware Design Language (by chipsalliance)

  • 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

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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