Using Template Metaprogramming for Hardware Description

Abstract

When designing digital systems, the Design Space is explored well in advance to rule out as many infeasible design options as possible, as a complete enumeration would be infeasible. Still, in the end, the designer is mostly left with several similar design options, i.e. actual choice of adder, Floating Point Unit etc. In such cases, a direct comparison cannot be avoided - at least in simulation. Even though the designer might have some module descriptions to be examined at hand, it might take a while to put them to work because of differing ports and control signals. But why should a system designer make the effort to adapt many modules to his design if he is only interested in a few aspects for a quick survey: overall power consumption, area occupation, timing, and correctness of results? This is the reason why we need a hardware description solely based on parameters. Such a description requires Metaprogramming Techniques because said parameters need to be translated to hardware behaviours. Hence, in this work we propose a parameter based hardware design paradigm based on SystemC and C++: Hardware Metadescription.