INVITED: BaseJump STL: SystemVerilog Needs a Standard Template Library for Hardware Design

Abstract

We propose a Standard Template Library (STL) for synthesizeable SystemVerilog that sharply reduces the time required to design digital circuits. We overview the principles that underly the design of the open-source BaseJump STL, including light-weight latency-insensitive interfaces that yield fast microarchitectures and low bug density; thin handshaking rules; fast porting of hardened chip regions across nodes; pervasive parameterization and specialization, and static error checking. We suggest extensions to SystemVerilog that will make it a more functional design language, and discuss our validation, including with the DARPA CRAFT-sponsored 16nm TSMC Celerity SoC with 511 RISC-V cores and 385M transistors. 80% of the modules for the design were instantiated directly from BaseJump STL, reducing verification time, accelerating development, and showing the promise of the approach.