The portable open-source IP core and utility library PoC

Abstract

Standard libraries and frameworks boost the productivity and performance significantly as they enable the re-use of optimized solutions for standard tasks. Hardware designs are often unnecessarily complex because a) a rich RTL library of standard solutions is missing and b) designs must often sacrifice portable and readable behavioral descriptions so as to meet timing and area constraints on the targeted device. The PoC Library addresses these issues. First of all, it provides abstracted solutions for standard tasks. These include single- and dual-port memory components as well as higher-level data structures such as FIFOs, stacks and deques built on top of them. The library further comprises cross-clock triggers, arithmetic and algorithmic cores, as for wide addition and sorting, as well as communication stack implementations. Each implementation is encapsulated by a stable interface that is independent from the specific target platform. Nonetheless, device-specific optimizations are available through specialized implementations, which are selected internally whenever this is beneficial or necessitated by the vendor flow. The provided modules are highly parametrizable to fit the application needs and enable design space exploration. An extensive set of utility functions and frequently used data types benefits the conciseness of both library and user code. Finally, PoC enables the continuous verification of its IP cores by automated testbenches. This verification flow is only one part of a flow infrastructure that also supports the generation of re-usable netlists as to speed up the integration of more complex cores into an application design. The flow infrastructure is implemented in Python and supports various simulation backends, synthesis tool chains and operating systems.