A Multi-threaded Fast Hardware Compiler for HDLs

Abstract

A set of new Hardware Description Languages (HDLs) are emerging to ease hardware design. HDL compilation time is a major bottleneck in the designer’s productivity. Moreover, as the HDLs are developed independently, the possibility to share innovations in compilation technology is limited.

We design and implement LiveHD, a new multi-threaded, fast, and generic compilation framework across many HDLs (FIRRTL, Verilog, and Pyrope). We propose new parallel full and bottom-up passes to handle HDLs. The resulting compiler can parallelize all the compiler steps.

LiveHD can achieve 5.5x scalability speedup when elaborating a CHISEL RISC-V Manycore. It also gets from 7.7x to 8.4x scalability speedup for a benchmark designed in all three HDLs. This is achieved with a fast single-threaded LiveHD baseline with 6x speedup compared to compilers such as Scala-FIRRTL and 8.6x against Yosys on Verilog.