UC Santa Cruz

The process of synthesis and simulation generation can take hours even for small changes. Software Development, however, embraced live programming to increase productivity. For productive live hardware development flow, Live Graph (LGraph) has been developed by MASC Lab to generate feedback within seconds.

In recent years, the MASC lab upgraded LGraph to a fast infrastructure for open source EDA developers and integrated design flow for hardware designers, which is called a hardware development (LiveHD) flow. In order to provide placement and routing feedback in a few second, we used an EDA tool called RapidWright to build a gateway from LGraph to Vivado.

RapidWright provides a pre-implemented methodology to achieve higher performance or productivity, After the integration is finished, LiveHD is able to place, route, and generate the bitstream on Vivado in real time for any small changes. The flow from LiveHD to FPGA placement and routing is complete.