Item — HN Reader

Agree. SV is even harder to parse and validate than C++ which is quite an achievement. I think they also made a wrong decision by replacing the Verilog by the SV standard.

But there are still a lot of useful parts in SV. I thought of creating a kind of "Verilog 20" which just incorporates the useful synthesizable features from SV including parts of SVA and interfaces. I would even consider to leave out parts of Verilog which are not synthesizable and use a different language for verification altogether (e.g. C++ or Python as e.g. with Cocotb).

I recently came accross Wirth's Lola and even built an IDE for it (https://github.com/rochus-keller/LolaCreator), but its practicality and usefulness is still to be demonstrated and the compiler has issues.

1 comments

I haven't heard of this one. Will take a look. I've been cataloguing everything I've found HDL wise and maybe one day I'll put out a potential spec API for what "the best parts" could look like. Similar to the Rust "inspired by" parts.

I completely agree with the Verilog20 idea. That's the way forward 100%.

Cocotb is awesome in my brief usage so far. The thing that remains to be seen though is performance benchmarking. It would be great to compare the sim runs of two identical tests, one in UVM and one in Cocotb. I highly doubt it could match the performance of a well written UVM test, and this becomes an issue as your SOC gets bigger.

> I haven't heard of this one

Here is the specification: https://inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/Lola/index.html

I don't yet have representative experimental data; the language is designed for the synthesis of synchronous FPGA designs and thus avoids some of the issues Verilog and other HDL suffer from. But it's too early for me to give a recommendation.

> The thing that remains to be seen though is performance benchmarking

Agree. I often use Verilator and I also experiment with LuaJIT (see https://github.com/rochus-keller/LjTools) which is one of the fastest VM available; it intend to use it for HW simulation and debugging too.