Goal-oriented hardware design

Abstract

This thesis presents Fide, a hardware design system that uses Goal-oriented programming. Goal-oriented programming is a programming framework to specify open-ended decision logic. This approach relies on two fundamental concepts-Goals and Techniques. Goals encode decision points and Techniques are scripts that describe how to satisfy Goals. In Fide, Goals represent the functional requirements (e.g., addition of two 32-bit binary integers) of the target circuit. Techniques represent hardware implementation alternatives that fulfill the functions. Techniques may declare their own subgoals, allowing a hierarchical decomposition of the functions. A Planner selects among Techniques based on the Goals declared to generate an implementation of the target circuit automatically. Users' preferences can be added to generate circuits for different scenarios: for different hardware environments, under different circuit constraints, or different implementation criteria etc. A Beta processor is implemented using Fide. The quality of the implementation is comparable to those optimized manually.