Tywaves

Abstract

Modern hardware design languages introduce high-level constructs to considerably improve design capabilities. The adoption of software language features and strong type systems contribute to expressing complex designs with cleaner and more robust code, facilitating the translation of software algorithms for hardware accelerators. Despite these advantages, their mainstream adoption is often discouraged by the lack of debugging tools that support the same level of abstraction. The usage of standard tools implies inspecting automatically generated RTL code, dissimilar from the source, which leads to a convoluted debugging experience.

This thesis presents Tywaves, a new kind of type-centered waveform viewer for the Chisel hardware language with typed circuit components and Tydi streams. Contributions to both the Chisel library and CIRCT MLIR compiler are described. Type information for debugging is extracted from the source language and linked with the target Verilog. A frontend waveform viewer is updated with the functionality to interpret and associate type information with values dumped from an RTL simulator and reconstruct the source language view. Finally, a Chisel API has been implemented to enable Tywaves from a high-level testbench.

The Tywaves project aims to enhance the debugging experience of modern hardware languages by reducing the gap between the source code and waveforms. It provides a new type-centered debugging format that helps to bring the same level of abstraction of new languages into waveform viewers.