Chisel Users Community

If you’re a Chisel user and want to stay connected to the wider user community, any of the following are great avenues:

Projects Using Chisel/FIRRTL

If you want to add your project to the list, let us know on the Chisel users mailing list!

Chisel

Project Description Author Links
Rocket Chip Generator RISC-V System-on-Chip Generator, 5-stage RISC-V Microprocessor @ucb-bar, @sifive Report
Berkeley Out-of-order Machine RISC-V Out-of-order/Multi-issue Microprocessor @ucb-bar Site, Thesis
RISC-V Mini 3-stage RISC-V Microprocessor @ucb-bar  
Sodor Processor Collection Educational RISC-V Microprocessors (1, 2, 3, 5-stage) @ucb-bar  
Patmos Time-predictable VLIW processor @t-crest Site
OpenSoC Fabric Parametrizable Network-on-Chip Generator @LBL-CoDEx Site
Hwacha Decoupled Vector-fetch Accelerator @ucb-bar Report
DANA Multilayer Perceptron Accelerator for Rocket @bu-icsg Paper
Gemmini Systolic-array Accelerator Generator @ucb-bar Paper
Edge TPU AI Inference Accelerator @google Video
ChiselFlow Information Flow Types in Chisel3 @apl-cornell Paper
PHMon Programmable Hardware Monitor @bu-icsg Paper
DINO CPU Davis In-Order (DINO) CPU models @jlpteaching Paper
Quasar CHISEL implementation of SweRV-EL2 @Lampro-Mellon Video
FP Divider Pipelined / Not Pipelined IEEE binary 32-bit divider using Harmonized Parabolic Synthesis @Ssavas Paper
Square Root Pipelined / Not Pipelined Square Root using Harmonized Parabolic Synthesis @Ssavas Paper
Pillars A Consistent CGRA Design Framework @pku-dasys Paper, Video
Tensil Machine Learning Accelerators @tensil-ai Website
Twine A Chisel Extension for Component-Level Heterogeneous Design @shibo-chen Paper

FIRRTL

Project Description Author Links
MIDAS/DESSERT/Golden Gate FPGA Accelerated Simulation @ucb-bar Papers 1, 2, 3, Video
Chiffre Run-time Fault Injection @IBM Paper
SIRRTL Security-typed FIRRTL @apl-cornell Paper
obfuscation Transforms to Obfuscate FIRRTL Circuits @jpsety  
Area/Timing Estimates Transforms for Area and Timing Estimates @intel Video

Chisel Developers Community

If you want to get more involved with the Chisel/FIRRTL ecosystem of projects, feel free to reach out to us on any of the mediums above. If you prefer to dive right in (or have bugs to report), a complete list of the associated Chisel/FIRRTL ecosystem of projects is below:

Contributors

Chisel, FIRRTL, and all related projects would not be possible without the contributions of our fantastic developer community. The following people have contributed to the current release of the projects:

Papers

While Chisel has come a long way since 2012, the original Chisel paper provides some background on motivations and an overview of the (now deprecated) Chisel 2 language:

The FIRRTL IR and FIRRTL compiler, introduced as part of Chisel 3, are discussed in both the following paper and specification1:

Finally, Chisel’s functional programming and bit-width inference ideas were inspired by earlier work on a hardware description language called Gel:

Attribution

If you use Chisel in your research, consider citing:

@inproceedings{bachrach:2012:chisel,
  author={J. {Bachrach} and H. {Vo} and B. {Richards} and Y. {Lee} and A. {Waterman} and R {Avižienis} and J. {Wawrzynek} and K. {Asanović}},
  booktitle={DAC Design Automation Conference 2012},
  title={Chisel: Constructing hardware in a Scala embedded language},
  year={2012},
  volume={},
  number={},
  pages={1212-1221},
  keywords={application specific integrated circuits;C++ language;field programmable gate arrays;hardware description languages;Chisel;Scala embedded language;hardware construction language;hardware design abstraction;functional programming;type inference;high-speed C++-based cycle-accurate software simulator;low-level Verilog;FPGA;standard ASIC flow;Hardware;Hardware design languages;Generators;Registers;Wires;Vectors;Finite impulse response filter;CAD},
  doi={10.1145/2228360.2228584},
  ISSN={0738-100X},
  month={June},}

If you use FIRRTL in your research consider citing:

@INPROCEEDINGS{8203780,
  author={A. Izraelevitz and J. Koenig and P. Li and R. Lin and A. Wang and A. Magyar and D. Kim and C. Schmidt and C. Markley and J. Lawson and J. Bachrach},
  booktitle={2017 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD)},
  title={Reusability is FIRRTL ground: Hardware construction languages, compiler frameworks,
  and transformations},
  year={2017},
  volume={},
  number={},
  pages={209-216},
  keywords={field programmable gate arrays;hardware description languages;program compilers;software reusability;hardware development practices;hardware libraries;open-source hardware intermediate representation;hardware compiler transformations;Hardware construction languages;retargetable compilers;software development;virtual Cambrian explosion;hardware compiler frameworks;parameterized libraries;FIRRTL;FPGA mappings;Chisel;Flexible Intermediate Representation for RTL;Reusability;Hardware;Libraries;Hardware design languages;Field programmable gate arrays;Tools;Open source software;RTL;Design;FPGA;ASIC;Hardware;Modeling;Reusability;Hardware Design Language;Hardware Construction Language;Intermediate Representation;Compiler;Transformations;Chisel;FIRRTL},
  doi={10.1109/ICCAD.2017.8203780},
  ISSN={1558-2434},
  month={Nov},}

@techreport{Li:EECS-2016-9,
    Author = {Li, Patrick S. and Izraelevitz, Adam M. and Bachrach, Jonathan},
    Title = {Specification for the FIRRTL Language},
    Institution = {EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley},
    Year = {2016},
    Month = {Feb},
    URL = {http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2016/EECS-2016-9.html},
    Number = {UCB/EECS-2016-9}
}

  1. This specification is provided for historical perspective. For the latest version of the FIRRTL specification you can use this link. ↩