Modular Compilation of Guarded Atomic Actions

Abstract

Over the last decade, Bluespec, a hardware description language of guarded atomic actions, has been used to describe rapidly modifiable, modular, no-compromise hardware designs and generate circuits from them. While the language itself supports significant modularity, the compiler compiles a module with other modules as parameters by in-lining or flattening the module. This forces the user to either suffer large compile times or to change the modular structure of the design. In this paper we propose a new modular compilation scheme which supports compilation of modules with interface methods as parameters and preserves Bluespec’s one-rule-at-a-time semantic model. This compilation process inherently requires the distributed scheduling of rules.