ESE Fall Seminar – “Tools for designing some exciting chips”

There is an enormous interest in developing customized, domain-specific systems-on-a-chip.  Continued improvement in computing efficiency requires functional specialization of hardware designs. But designing complex chips is difficult.   This talk presents the Chipyard framework, an integrated SoC design, simulation, and implementation environment for specialized compute systems. Chipyard includes configurable, composable, open-source, generator-based IP blocks that can be used across multiple stages of the hardware development flow while maintaining design intent and integration consistency. We discuss some sample designs, the use of the framework in classes, and opportunities for extension and improvement.