flipSyrup

Cycle-Accurate Hardware Simulation Framework on Abstract FPGA Platforms

Copyright (C) 2013, Shinya Takamaeda-Yamazaki

E-mail: shinya_at_is.naist.jp

License

Apache License 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)

Publication

If you use flipSyrup in your research, please cite our paper.

• Shinya Takamaeda-Yamazaki and Kenji Kise: A Framework for Efficient Rapid Prototyping by Virtually Enlarging FPGA Resources, 2014 International Conference on ReConFigurable Computing and FPGAs (ReConFig 2014), December 2014. Paper Slide

@INPROCEEDINGS{Takamaeda:2014:ReConFig:flipSyrup,
author={Takamaeda-Yamazaki, Shinya and Kise, Kenji}, 
booktitle={ReConFigurable Computing and FPGAs (ReConFig), 2014 International Conference on}, 
title={A framework for efficient rapid prototyping by virtually enlarging FPGA resources}, 
year={2014}, 
month={Dec}, 
pages={1-8}, 
doi={10.1109/ReConFig.2014.7032488},
}

• Shinya Takamaeda-Yamazaki and Kenji Kise: flipSyrup: Cycle-Accurate Hardware Simulation Framework on Abstract FPGA Platforms, 24th International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL 2014) (Poster), September 2014. Paper

@INPROCEEDINGS{Takamaeda:2014:FPL:flipSyrup,
author={Takamaeda-Yamazaki, Shinya and Kise, Kenji}, 
booktitle={Field Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL), 2014 24th International Conference on}, 
title={flipSyrup: Cycle-accurate hardware simulation framework on abstract FPGA platforms}, 
year={2014}, 
month={Sept}, 
pages={1-4},
doi={10.1109/FPL.2014.6927436},}

What's flipSyrup?

flipSyrup is an FPGA-based prototyping framework on modern FPGA platforms.

flipSyrup genrates an AXI4 IP-core package from your prototyping target RTL design implemented under the resource abstraction of FPGA platform given by flipSyrup. The generated IP-core can be used as a standard IP-core with other common IP-cores together.

flipSyrup supports both single FPGA platform and multi-FPGA platform. You can implement a cycle-accurate prototyping system on both situations.

flipSyrup employs two resources abstractions that an FPGA platform has.

• Syrup Memory
  • Memory system abstraction.
  • Prototyping target logic can use this abstract memory as an ideal single-cycle memory.
  • flipSyrup compiler automatically synthesizes a cache-based memory system to simulate cycle-accurately the taget behavior.
• Syrup Channel
  • Inter-FPGA interconnection abstraction for multi-FPGA platform based prototyping.
  • Prototyping target logic can use this abstrct channel as a register to be connected to its neighbor FPGA.
  • flipSyrup compiler automatically synthesizes a FIFO-based synchronizatoin system to communicate with neighbor FPGAs.

Installation

Requirements

• Python: 2.7, 3.4 or later

Python3 is recommended.

• Icarus Verilog: 0.9.7 or later

Install on your platform. For exmple, on Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install iverilog

• Jinja2: 2.8 or later

Install on your python environment by using pip:

pip install jinja2

• Pyverilog: 1.0.4 or later

Install from pip (or download and install from GitHub):

pip install pyverilog

Install

Install Veriloggen:

python setup.py install

Getting Started

You can use the flipSyrup command from your console.

flipsyrup

You can find some examples in 'flipSyrup/tests'.

Let's begin flipSyrup by an example in 'tests/singleport'. You will find two source files.

• userlogic.v : User-defined Verilog code using Syrup memory blocks

Then type 'make' and 'make run' to simulate sample system.

make build
make sim

Or type commands as below directly.

python flipsyrup config/sample.config -t userlogic -I include/ --usertest=tests/singleport/testbench.v tests/singleport/userlogic.v 
iverilog -I syrup_userlogic_v1_00_a/hdl/verilog/ syrup_userlogic_v1_00_a/test/testbench_userlogic.v 
./a.out

flipSyrup compiler generates a directory for IP-core (syrup_userlogic_v1_00_a, in this example).

'syrup_userlogic_v1_00_a.v' includes

• IP-core RTL design (hdl/verilog/syrup_userlogic.v)
• Test bench (test/testbench_userlogic.v)
• XPS setting files (syrup_userlogic_v2_1_0.{mpd,pao,tcl})

A bit-stream can be synthesized by using Xilinx Platform Studio. Please copy the generated IP-core into 'pcores' directory of XPS project.

flipSyrup Command Options

Command

flipsyrup [config] [-t topmodule] [-I includepath]+ [--memimg=filename] [--usertest=filename] [file]+

Description

• file
  • User-logic Verilog file (.v) and FPGA system memory specification (.config). Automatically, .v file is recognized as a user-logic Verilog file, and .config file recongnized as a memory specification of used FPGA system, respectively.
• config
  • Configuration file which includes memory and device specification
• -t
  • Name of user-defined top module, default is "userlogic".
• -I
  • Include path for input Verilog HDL files.
• --memimg
  • DRAM image file in HEX DRAM (option, if you need). The file is copied into test directory. If no file is assigned, the array is initialized with incremental values.
• --usertest
  • User-defined test code file (option, if you need). The code is copied into testbench script.

Related Project

Pyverilog

• Python-based Hardware Design Processing Toolkit for Verilog HDL