Not being a hardware person, when I heard “Hardware Design Language” I was thinking more along the lines of Snow White[1] - the idea of an open source industrial design language would be pretty interesting, something along the lines of Material UI but for hardware.
Chisel: A Modern Hardware Design Language
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Re: Chisel: A Modern Hardware Design Language
#12Everytime I look at the examples, coming from a verilog background, it's strange to see the clock and reset are all implicit rather than explicit. The blinking led for example, while readable the link between the generated verilog with clock and reset is not clear. How are multi clock domains and Async CDCs handled? I've never used chisel so maybe this all is well managed, but not being explicit about the clock domai…
Their docs explain it. It’s sorta like “implicit this”. https://www.chisel-lang.org/docs/explanations/multi-clock
Re: Chisel: A Modern Hardware Design Language
#13The goal is worthy, the effort is commendable, but the underlying language (Scala) is an absolute turn-off AFAIC, and I suspect I'm far from being the only one.
Re: Chisel: A Modern Hardware Design Language
#14I don’t understand how this improves upon VHDL, even after reading their own explanation[0]. Just why they think object orientation makes hardware design easier isn’t really explained. After a quick look at it I much prefer VHDL’s entities (though their syntax is rather too wordy for my tastes), which at least make the direction of signals clearer. The problem with libraries could have been easily solved by extending/fixing VHDL instead of going through all this effort.
0. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53007782/what-benefits-d...
Re: Chisel: A Modern Hardware Design Language
#15There's a similar project at Intel: https://github.com/intel/rohd
It uses Dart instead of Scala.
Re: Chisel: A Modern Hardware Design Language
#16I've played with this and while I much prefer it to verilog (and even migen) it is still too implicit for me. Most of my time spent building VGA toy was wasted debugging wrong counter wrapping and similar. I would like to try out something where the register width and operation semantics (wrap, extend, saturate) have to be always explicit. Maybe it would turn out to be too annoying?
> I would like to try out something where the register width and operation semantics (wrap, extend, saturate) have to be always explicit.
Try VHDL. It’s Ada heritage gives it that explicit feel.
Re: Chisel: A Modern Hardware Design Language
#17Not being a hardware person, when I heard “Hardware Design Language” I was thinking more along the lines of Snow White[1] - the idea of an open source industrial design language would be pretty interesting, something along the lines of Material UI but for hardware. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_White_design_language
That’s interesting! HDL’s are older than dirt and the term is pretty well embedded in the computer engineering field at this point, but it is a funny near-collision.
Re: Chisel: A Modern Hardware Design Language
#18I've said as much before but I find the issue with alternative HDLs Vs SystemVerilog is they concentrate on fixing annoying and frustrating things but don't address the really hard issues in hardware design and can actually make them harder. For example SystemVerilog has no real typing which sucks, so a typical thing to do is to build a massively improved type system for a new HDL. However in my experience good use o…
Have you looked at/used Bluespec SystemVerilog? If so, any comments based on your experience?
Re: Chisel: A Modern Hardware Design Language
#19Everytime I look at the examples, coming from a verilog background, it's strange to see the clock and reset are all implicit rather than explicit. The blinking led for example, while readable the link between the generated verilog with clock and reset is not clear. How are multi clock domains and Async CDCs handled? I've never used chisel so maybe this all is well managed, but not being explicit about the clock domai…
Their docs explain it. It’s sorta like “implicit this”. https://www.chisel-lang.org/docs/explanations/multi-clock
Thanks, so a single clock and reset is implicit, but clock2 (or more) is explicit.
Re: Chisel: A Modern Hardware Design Language
#20Not being a hardware person, when I heard “Hardware Design Language” I was thinking more along the lines of Snow White[1] - the idea of an open source industrial design language would be pretty interesting, something along the lines of Material UI but for hardware. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_White_design_language
Are there other ones similar to this? For example, I really loved the 80s/90s Sony style.