Supporting RTL flow compatibility in a microarchitecture-level design framework

Abstract

Current RTL-based design methodologies face significant scaling challenges related to the difficulty of designing, modifying, and verifying RTL. RTL contains primarily low level structural information about the design. In contrast, the microarchitecture-level is much closer to the specification level, making it an effective entry point for hardware design. The explicit description of the high-level units of work is also beneficial for verification. Currently used models for high level design have very complex semantics. In this paper, we present a microarchitectural modeling language with simpler semantics. We demonstrate that it results in a significantly simpler synthesis to Verilog, providing for integration with existing RTL flows. Moreover, the simple semantics of the model enable the generation of PSL assertions for functionally verifying correctness of the synthesis. We demonstrate the efficacy of this approach through two case-studies---a router switch and a processor design. We synthesized both designs, and formally verified the synthesis using the generated assertions.