Agile Hardware Development and Instrumentation With PyRTL

Abstract

Domain-specific architectures have emerged as a promising solution to meet growing technology demands but with this comes an urgent need to improve hardware methodologies which often have long design cycles, rely on closed source and expensive tools, and have high nonrecurring engineering costs. In this article, we describe how our work developing PyRTL, an open source Python-based Hardware Development Toolkit, has proven to be a powerful agile hardware development and analysis tool with the features to improve current methodologies. We describe how this toolkit-driven approach encourages hardware reuse using modern object-oriented programming features and present an examination of its custom intermediate representation for hardware debugging, analysis, and instrumentation. This approach has proven useful in supporting fast design iteration in a variety of domains including cryptography and machine learning.