Throughout 2020 we have been hard at work developing proper, portable SystemVerilog support for multiple open-source FPGA and ASIC design tools used by us and our customers, most notably Yosys and Verilator. We strongly believe that the support is a necessary step in building a collaborative ecosystem and scalable and reproducible CIs, especially publicly accessible ones that are common in multi-organization projects such as OpenTitan and CHIPS Alliance. Leading the efforts towards achieving this goal, we’ve been developing a fully open source SystemVerilog parsing flow for Yosys and Verilator using UHDM and Surelog, achieving an important milestone: being able to fully parse, synthesize and simulate OpenTitan’s Ibex core directly from the SystemVerilog source.
Getting closer to open-source synthesis and simulation
In this effort, Antmicro has been gradually covering various SystemVerilog functionalities and real-world implementations, developing support for different open source RISC-V cores and moving closer to a complete open-source synthesis and simulation tools support for Ibex – a small and efficient, 32-bit, RISC-V core used in the OpenTitan project. Originally developed at ETH Zürich as RI5CY, it is now maintained and developed further by lowRISC – a not-for-profit organization promoting collaborative engineering that targets open source silicon designs and tools.