UC Santa Cruz

This paper proposes a new toolchain for digital architecture development which is designed to leverage Fluid Pipelines, a variant of latency-insensitive (LI) systems developed at the UCSC Micro-Architecture (MASC) Lab. Prior work on Fluid Pipelines and other LI systems has shown that they have promising properties which can be leveraged in various ways to aid in digital architecture design, especially when developing and manipulating large digital architectures, but that there are also challenges when working with this type of system. This paper presents Pyrope, a toolchain designed for developing Fluid Pipelined digital architectures. The toolchain includes a custom hardware description language and optimizations for simulation, synthesis, and verification which leverage Fluid Pipelines. The final section of this document presents LiveSim, a live development environment built on top of Pyrope, which uses incremental compilation and hot binary reloading to update simulation results based on code changes in seconds, even for large architectures.