FIRRTL (A Flexible Intermediate Representation for RTL) is motivated by the success of Chisel and has two parts: 1) a specification of the formalized elaborated graph that the Chisel DSL produces, prior to any simplification, and 2) a library of micro-passes that are used to simplify, transform, or specialize arbitrary FIRRTL graphs.
The ideas for FIRRTL (Flexible Intermediate Representation for RTL) originated from work on Chisel, a hardware description language (HDL) embedded in Scala used for writing highly-parameterized circuit design generators. Chisel designers manipulate circuit components using Scala functions, encode their interfaces in Scala types, and use Scala's object-orientation features to write their own circuit libraries. This form of meta-programming enables expressive, reliable and type-safe generators that improve RTL design productivity and robustness.
The computer architecture research group at U.C. Berkeley relies critically on Chisel to allow small teams of graduate students to design sophisticated RTL circuits. Over a three year period with under twelve graduate students, the architecture group has taped-out over ten different designs.
Internally, the investment in developing and learning Chisel was rewarded with huge gains in productivity. However, Chisel's external rate of adoption was slow for the following reasons.
As a consequence, Chisel needed to be redesigned from the ground up to standardize its semantics, modularize its compilation process, and cleanly separate its front-end, intermediate representation, and backends. A well defined intermediate representation (IR) allows the system to be targeted by other HDLs embedded in other host programming languages, making it possible for RTL designers to work within a language they are already comfortable with. A clearly defined IR with a concrete syntax also allows for inspection of the output of circuit generators and transformers thus making clear the distinction between the host language and the constructed circuit. Clearly defined semantics allows users without knowledge of the compiler implementation to write circuit transformers; examples include optimization of circuits for simulation speed, and automatic insertion of signal activity counters. An additional benefit of a well defined IR is the structural invariants that can be enforced before and after each compilation stage, resulting in a more robust compiler and structured mechanism for error checking.
FIRRTL represents the standardized elaborated circuit that the Chisel HDL produces. FIRRTL represents the circuit immediately after Chisel's elaboration but before any circuit simplification. It is designed to resemble the Chisel HDL after all meta-programming has executed. Thus, a user program that makes little use of meta-programming facilities should look almost identical to the generated FIRRTL.
For this reason, FIRRTL has first-class support for high-level constructs such as vector types, bundle types, conditional statements, partial connects, and modules. These high-level constructs are then gradually removed by a sequence of {em lowering} transformations. During each lowering transformation, the circuit is rewritten into an equivalent circuit using simpler, lower-level constructs. Eventually the circuit is simplified to its most restricted form, resembling a structured netlist, which allows for easy translation to an output language (e.g. Verilog). This form is given the name {em lowered FIRRTL} (LoFIRRTL) and is a strict subset of the full FIRRTL language.
Because the host language is now used solely for its meta-programming facilities, the frontend can be very light-weight, and additional HDLs written in other languages can target FIRRTL and reuse the majority of the compiler toolchain.
The new alpha version Chisel, Chisel3, can be found here. The alpha release of FIRRTL can be found here. The full specification of the FIRRTL Language can be found here