Imperial College London > Talks@ee.imperial > CAS Talks > Beyond the Event Driven Paradigm - Introducing the Migen FHDL library

Beyond the Event Driven Paradigm - Introducing the Migen FHDL library

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Despite being faster than schematics entry, hardware design with Verilog and VHDL remains tedious and inefficient for several reasons. The event-driven model introduces issues and manual coding that are unnecessary for synchronous circuits, which represent the lion’s share of today’s logic designs. Counter-intuitive arithmetic rules result in steeper learning curves and provide a fertile ground for subtle bugs in designs. Finally, support for procedural generation of logic (metaprogramming) through “generate” statements is very limited and restricts the ways code can be made generic, reused and organized.

To address those issues, we have developed the Migen FHDL library that replaces the event-driven paradigm with the notions of combinatorial and synchronous statements, has arithmetic rules that make integers always behave like mathematical integers, and most importantly allows the design’s logic to be constructed by a Python program. This last point enables hardware designers to take advantage of the richness of the Python language – object oriented programming, function parameters, generators, operator overloading, libraries, etc. – to build well organized, reusable and elegant designs.

Other Migen libraries are built on FHDL and provide various tools such as a system-on-chip interconnect infrastructure, a dataflow programming system, a more traditional high-level synthesizer that compiles Python routines into state machines with datapaths, and a simulator that allows test benches to be written in Python.

Speaker’s bio: Sébastien Bourdeauducq is an inventor passionate about science, electronics and open source. After working for several small companies – which included developing the Wi-Fi driver infrastructure for the Nabaztag/tag (200000 units sold) – he founded Milkymist Labs in the summer of 2007. The endeavor combined his interest for the world of music and live performances with the desire to learn about and open up system-on-chip (SoC) design. One unexpected highlight of the project has been the reuse by NASA of the SoC’s memory controller in 2009 and its successful launch on board the International Space Station in August 2012. Since 2011, Sébastien is also providing gateware and electronics engineering services to scientific institutes such as CERN (open hardware repository), DESY (HiSCORE cosmic ray detector network in Siberia), the University of Cape Town (RHINO software defined radio platform) and the Paul-Drude-Institut in Berlin. Sébastien holds an engineering degree from Supélec and a MSc in SoC design from KTH .

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