Edalize 0.5.0

A new version of Edalize has just been released and I'm taking the opportunity to dust off this old blog by writing a bit about some of the highlights.

In case someone is wondering, Edalize is an open-source abstraction library for EDA tools that allow users to make a description of their RTL design once in a format called EDAM (EDA Metadata) and then Edalize can setup a project for any of the 40+ supported EDA tools. This allows quickly retargeting a design for different flows and saves users from learning all the intricacies of each of these EDA tools. Edalize does the job for you. This five minute award-winning introduction video goes into more detail for those who are interested.

Anyway, Edalize 0.5.0 was just released and it contains a whole bunch of new features.

New backends

Three new backends were added for the legacy tool API. These are called filelist for producing .f files, sandpipersaas for the SandPiper TL-Verilog compiler and openroad for the OpenROAD toolchain. And with this, we now support 40 different EDA tools with the same simple interface. Not bad considering the EDA world is mostly known for its insane level of incompatibilty, vendor lock-in and general user hostility. Still waiting for the EDA vendor to natively support the EDAM format though. That would make Edalize unnecessary and I could spend my time improving the world instead of adding new tool support.

Note: With this release, the old tool API is under feature freeze. Only backends currently under review will be considered for addition. No new features of backends will be added outside of that. All future work should be done for the new flow API instead

New flows

Two flows have been added to the new Flow API. generic is a customizable flow that can be used for all single-tool flows. It is also used internally as a parent class to the sim and lint flows which saves quite a few lines of code.

gls is a gate-level simulation flow that runs a synthesis flow to produce a netlist followed by a simulator. All simulators and synthesis tools covered by the new flow API should be automatically supported. It is also a good way to show off some of the benefits of the new flow API. Doing this with the old tool API would had been terribly complicated.

Note: Help is needed to port all the tool classes from the legacy tool API to the new flow API. There is still only a small subset of tools supported.

External tool and flow plugins

Edalize now supports PEP0420, also known as implicit namespace packages. What does means in practice is that new flows and tools can be added outside of the Edalize code base, so that Edalize users who needs support for some internal proprietary tool or wants to run an esoteric flow can add these without having to modify the Edalize code base. There is documentation that describes how this works in practice.

Avoid unnecessary rebuilds

A much-requested feature is to avoid rebuilding when the source files haven't changed. This is now possible for most cases using the new flow API. A demonstrator will also soon be released that shows an advanced example of this will soon be released. For most users (at least the ones who have already migrated to the flow API), the only visible change will be that builds will become faster in many cases.

Smaller things

The modelsim backend supports mfcu mode where all files are compiled into the same compilation unit. icarus supports multiple toplevels. yosys and vivado both support verilog output and recognizes files tagged with the simulation tag. Both these features are used by the gate-level sim flow. The internal flow API has been improved to make creation of new flows easier and have less boilerplate code.

That's pretty much it. Getting the newest version of edalize should be as easy as running pip install -U edalize (the -U forces an upgrade if you already have an older version installed). Hope you enjoy it!