Designing Hardware Systems and Accelerators with Open-Source BH (Bluespec Haskell)

Contents

• 1. Software Installation
• 2. Tutorial Document
• 3. Tutorial Examples
• 4. Other useful links
• 5. ABSTRACT

This is the public GitHub site for a tutorial on hardware design using open-source Bluespec tools, presented at ICFP 2020 (25th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming) on August 23, 2020 (the whole conference is “virtual”, i.e., online only).

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1. Software Installation

Before the tutorial, please install the following open-source tools (each tool’s web page has its own installation instructions):

• The bsc compiler from: https://github.com/B-Lang-org/bsc.

  • You will need to install Haskell in order to build bsc

• The open-source Verilog simulator IVerilog.

  • For much faster Verilog simulation, you can install the open-source verilator from https://www.veripool.org.

• The open-source waveform viewer gtkwave.

• For the final example in the tutorial, we’re going to attach an accelerator to a small RISC-V-based computer system, for which you can git-clone https://github.com/bluespec/Flute

Re. Verilog simulator and gtkwave, you can get by without them, since bsc compiles its own standalone simulator “Bluesim”, and viewing waveforms is just one way to observe/debug designs. However, we recommend these to begin getting familiar with the hardware-design ecosystem which is very Verilog/SystemVerilog-centric (both tools install trivially). These two are available standardly in common package installers, such as:

$ sudo apt-get install iverilog
$ sudo apt-get install gtkwave

All the tutorial tools and code are developed and tested on Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS, but it is likely also to work on Debian Linux and MacOS.

2. Tutorial Document

The whole tutorial is in one document (asciidoc version):

    ICFP2020_Bluespec_Tutorial.adoc

or its HTML version:

    ICFP2020_Bluespec_Tutorial_BH.html

The latter is produced from the former using asciidoctor, which is available in most package installers (e.g., apt-get install asciidoctor).

GitHub and some browsers with asciidoc plug-ins will automatically process and display the .adoc version. Otherwise, please have your browser display the .html version.

3. Tutorial Examples

All the code examples, Makefiles to build them etc. are in the Examples/ directory.

4. Other useful links

• The ICFP 2020 conference web page is https://icfp20.sigplan.org, including registration information.

  • The conference’s tutorials page is https://icfp20.sigplan.org/track/icfp-2020-tutorials#event-overview

5. ABSTRACT

Have you ever considered designing and implementing a piece of digital hardware, such as an accelerator on an attached FPGA for a complex computation (Machine Learning, Computer Vision, …​), or just for fun, but were afraid that hardware design was too far from your wheelhouse?

In this tutorial we hope to leverage your knowledge of Haskell to demystify this, using a lecture + demonstration format which you can follow along on your laptop during the tutorial. We will use Bluespec BH, which is a high-level hardware design language using Haskell syntax and types. BH and its sibling BSV are mature, industrial-strength hardware design languages, with over 20 years of development; they have been used to design complex components in commercial shipping chips. The bsc tool for compiling BH and BSV to Verilog was open-sourced in January 2020.

We will start with a simple “Hello World!” example, but rapidly climb through the gears to end with a complete, Linux-capable RISC-V CPU controlling a pipelined memory-to-memory array-sorting accelerator (all the materials for this are open-source).

For background preparation we only assume you know Haskell, and perhaps nothing about hardware design.

If you wish to follow along on your laptop, please pre-install a few tools described above in [SoftwareInstallation]

All the tools and tutorial materials are free and open-source.

At the end of the tutorial, we hope you will:

• understand how a Haskell-based language (Haskell syntax, Haskell types) can be used to describe complex hardware system STRUCTURES, and how Guarded Atomic Actions (rewrite rules) can be used to describe complex hardware system BEHAVIOR in a composable way (and also enabling formal verification).

• feel “I can do this!”, i.e., that you can read and modify the open-source designs shown in the tutorial, or even create your own hardware designs.