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A Golden Age of Hardware Description Languages: Applying Programming Language Techniques to Improve Design Productivity

Authors Lenny Truong, Pat Hanrahan

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Lenny Truong
  • Stanford University, USA
Pat Hanrahan
  • Stanford University, USA

Funding

The authors would like to thank the DARPA DSSoC program (contract # FA8650-18-2-7861), the AHA and SystemX affiliate programs, and Intel's Agile ISTC for supporting this work.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and Will Crichton for providing feedback on paper drafts. They would also like to thank their colleagues at Stanford, particularly members of the HardwarePL Reading Group and the AHA Agile Hardware Center, as many of the ideas in this paper are the direct or indirect result of the many intellectual discussions that they have collectively participated in. Finally, the authors would like to thank the organizers of SNAPL for creating a venue for visionary papers on programming languages.

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Lenny Truong and Pat Hanrahan. A Golden Age of Hardware Description Languages: Applying Programming Language Techniques to Improve Design Productivity. In 3rd Summit on Advances in Programming Languages (SNAPL 2019). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 136, pp. 7:1-7:21, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2019) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.SNAPL.2019.7

Abstract

Leading experts have declared that there is an impending golden age of computer architecture. During this age, the rate at which architects will be able to innovate will be directly tied to the design and implementation of the hardware description languages they use. Thus, the programming languages community stands on the critical path to this new golden age. This implies that we are also on the cusp of a golden age of hardware description languages. In this paper, we discuss the intellectual challenges facing researchers interested in hardware description language design, compilers, and formal methods. The major theme will be identifying opportunities to apply programming language techniques to address issues in hardware design productivity. Then, we present a vision for a multi-language system that provides a framework for developing solutions to these intellectual problems. This vision is based on a meta-programmed host language combined with a core embedded hardware description language that is used as the basis for the research and development of a sea of domain-specific languages. Central to the design of this system is the core language which is based on an abstraction that provides a general mechanism for the composition of hardware components described in any language.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Hardware → Hardware description languages and compilation
Keywords
  • Hardware Description Languages

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