A Vertically Integrated Framework for Templatized Chip Design

TL;DR

This paper presents a framework that translates high-level object-oriented software specifications into hardware chip designs, maintaining familiar abstractions and simplifying the design process for learners with minimal performance constraints.

Contribution

It introduces a vertically integrated, object-aligned design approach that preserves software-hardware correspondence and employs formal type systems for efficient module interaction.

Findings

Achieves a one-to-one mapping between software objects and chip regions.

Uses formal type systems to verify hardware communication patterns.

Develops layout techniques supporting object-aligned design style.

Abstract

Developers who primarily engage with software often struggle to incorporate custom hardware into their applications, even though specialized silicon can provide substantial benefits to machine learning and AI, as well as to the application domains that they enable. This work investigates how a chip can be generated from a high-level object-oriented software specification, targeting introductory-level chip design learners with only very light performance requirements, while maintaining mental continuity between the chip layout and the software source program. In our approach, each software object is represented as a corresponding region on the die, producing a one-to-one structural mapping that preserves these familiar abstractions throughout the design flow. To support this mapping, we employ a modular construction strategy in which vertically composed IP blocks implement the behavioral protocols expressed in software. A direct syntactic translation, however, cannot meet hardware-level efficiency or communication constraints. For this reason, we leverage formal type systems based on sequences that check whether interactions between hardware modules adhere to the communication patterns described in the software model. We further examine hardware interconnect strategies for composing many such modules and develop layout techniques suited to this object-aligned design style. Together, these contributions preserve mental continuity from software to chip design for new learners and enables practical layout generation, ultimately reducing the expertise required for software developers to participate in chip creation.