The Ultimate Digital Designer’s Assistant

For most of the past decade we’ve had the choice of implementing the solutions to our client’s needs in RTLs, such as VHDL, Verilog, or SystemVerilog; or in Bluespec SystemVerilog (BSV). Because much of what we do involves the business of complex concurrency, lots of moving parts that are difficult to reason about in the whole but easier to grasp a rule-step at a time, BSV has been an obvious choice for us. But there is an important aspect of designing with BSV that we feel is often overlooked by those not familiar with the art, and is perhaps one of the language’s best features:
BSV is the Ultimate Digital Designer’s Assistant!

There’s a saying in our shop with regard to clearly-written BSV codes that goes something like this: “If it compiles, it will work”. With those words, hundreds of verification engineers have just aimed tactical nukes towards Manchester New Hampshire, so please let me explain. There are several reasons why this is the case, I’ll touch on a couple.

First, there are crazy-good type safety and formal guarantees enforced by the compiler. Compared to Verilog, which is awful, and even VHDL, which is less-awful, the BSV compiler does an amazing amount of analysis and type-checking statically at compile time within seconds of your pinky coming down on the enter key. We have spent days debugging issues in conventional RTL that the BSV compiler would have detected in seconds. In 2006, Stuart Sutherland presented a SNUG paper highlighting 57 “Gotchas” with Verilog and SystemVerilog. BSV detects or avoids the vast majority of them. There is simply that much less to get-wrong, and when it is wrong, you are getting the most-excellent feedback from the compiler while the ideas and concepts have barely left your fingertips and are fresh in your mind.

Next, there is this quality; you may have seen it on the masthead of this blog, of “Scalable Atomicity”. In a nutshell, the BSV designer reasons about rules within a module, and methods a module exposes to others. The BSV compiler ruthlessly checks and ensures that the deterministic behavior of the resultant sequential circuit is equivalent to the result of each rule firing one at a time. We look at any rule in our system, and the interesting state-changing actions between the curly-braces and reason about them one-at-a-time. Our reptilian brains can handle that focused task! The BSV compiler then composes a deterministic schedule, devoid of any new state elements, that produces results identical to the one-at-a-time firing of all the rules in the system we have just reasoned about.

Our IP shop designs DMA engines, Packet Processors, Beamformers, and the like. Our clients demand that we “go deep quick”. Meaning we show them something partially-functional almost immediately. Without BSV by our side to check our work at every compile, we would not be able to move nearly as quickly. The edit-compile-debug cycle with BSV is seconds. We go around that loop, including bit- and cycle- true C simulation dozens of times each day. Then we make a bitstream, and it “just works”. If you find yourself complaining that the FPGA vendor tools take a long time and slow your productivity; perhaps you should explore how a digital designer’s assistant such as BSV would change your world.