OpenSoC Fabric: On-Chip Network Generator: Using Chisel to Generate a Parameterizable On-Chip Interconnect Fabric

Abstract

Recent advancements in technology scaling have sparked a trend towards greater integration with large-scale chips containing thousands of processors connected to memories and other I/O devices using non-trivial network topologies. Software simulation suffers from long execution times or reduced accuracy in such complex systems, whereas hardware RTL development is too time-consuming. We present OpenSoC Fabric, a parameterizable and powerful on-chip network generator for evaluating future large-scape chip multiprocessors and SoCs. OpenSoC Fabric leverages a new hardware DSL, Chisel, which contains powerful abstractions provided by its base language, Scala, and generates both software (C++) and hardware (Verilog) models from a single code base. This is in contrast to other tools readily available which typically provide either software or hardware models, but not both. The OpenSoC Fabric infrastructure is modeled after existing state-of-the-art simulators, offers large and powerful collections of configuration options, is open-source, and uses object-oriented design and functional programming to make functionality extension as easy as possible.