The essence of Bluespec: a core language for rule-based hardware design

• Main Authors: Bourgeat, Thomas (Author), Pit-Claudel, Clément (Author), Chlipala, Adam (Author), Arvind, Arvind (Author)
• Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (Contributor), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 2021-09-23T19:07:11Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

 The Bluespec hardware-description language presents a significantly higher-level view than hardware engineers are used to, exposing a simpler concurrency model that promotes formal proof, without compromising on performance of compiled circuits. Unfortunately, the cost model of Bluespec has been unclear, with performance details depending on a mix of user hints and opaque static analysis of potential concurrency conflicts within a design. In this paper we present Koika, a derivative of Bluespec that preserves its desirable properties and yet gives direct control over the scheduling decisions that determine performance. Koika has a novel and deterministic operational semantics that uses dynamic analysis to avoid concurrency anomalies. Our implementation includes Coq definitions of syntax, semantics, key metatheorems, and a verified compiler to circuits. We argue that most of the extra circuitry required for dynamic analysis can be eliminated by compile-time BSV-style static analysis.