README.md

Tool analysis results

This folder contains considerations and results of the analysis that has been made. It is divided as follows:

The chiseltest folder analyzes the chiseltest¹ tool and the features related to it with a focus on the advantages and disadvantages of the tool.
hgdb reports the observations about the hgdb² (GitHub³) debugger tool.
The waveforms directory, instead, explore first the strengths of signals inspections from waveform viewers, and it finally highlights the generic weaknesses of signal representations of circuits written in modern HDLs, in this case Chisel.
Finally, all the examples (in the examples folder) have been tested using the three tools (chiseltest to write the test benches, hgdb and waveforms to inspect the signals). analysis-by-example analyzes each example, highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of each tool for each target aspect of the examples. It especially focuses on how the Chisel and Tydi-Chisel code is represented by each tool.

The officially supported testing framework for Chisel and Chisel-related projects. ↩
Keyi Zhang, Zain Asgar, and Mark Horowitz. “Bringing source-level debugging frameworks to hard-ware generators”. In: Proceedings of the 59th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference. DAC'22: 59th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference. San Francisco California: ACM, July 10, 2022, pp. 1171–1176. ↩
Keyi Zhang. Kuree/hgdb. ↩