Before this commit, any wire that was not driven by an output port of
exactly one comb cell would not be localized, even if there were no
feedback arcs through that wire. This would cause the wire to become
buffered and require (often quite a few) extraneous delta cycles
during evaluation. To alleviate this problem, -O5 was running
`splitnets -driver`.
However, this solution was mistaken. Because `splitnets -driver`
followed by `opt_clean -purge` would produce more nets with multiple
drivers, it would have to be iterated to fixpoint. Moreover, even if
this was done, it would not be sufficient because `opt_clean -purge`
does not currently remove wires with the `\init` attribute (and it
is not desirable to remove such wires, since they correspond to
registers and may be useful for debugging).
The proper solution is to consider the condition in which a wire
may be localized. Specifically, if there are no feedback arcs through
this wire, and no part of the wire is driven by an output of a sync
cell, then the wire holds no state and is localizable.
After this commit, the original condition for not localizing a wire
is replaced by a check for any sync cell driving it. This makes it
unnecessary to run `splitnets -driver` in the majority of cases
to get a design with no buffered wires, and -O5 no longer includes
that pass. As a result, Minerva SRAM SoC no longer has any buffered
wires, and runs ~27% faster.
In addition, this commit prepares the flow graph for introduction
of sync outputs of black boxes.
Co-authored-by: Jean-François Nguyen <jf@lambdaconcept.com>
Any buffered combinatorial wires (including, as a subset, feedback
wires) will prevent the design from always converging in one delta
cycle. Before this commit, only feedback wires were detected. After
this commit, any buffered combinatorial wires, including feedback
wires, are detected.
Co-authored-by: Jean-François Nguyen <jf@lambdaconcept.com>
Both parameters and attributes are necessary because the parameters
have to be the same between every instantiation of the cell, but
attributes may well vary. For example, for an UART PHY, the type
of the PHY (tty, pty, socket) would be a parameter, but configuration
of the implementation specified by the type (socket address) would
be an attribute.
This commit adds support for replacing RTLIL modules with CXXRTL
black boxes. Black box port widths may not depend on the parameters
with which it is instantiated (yet); the parameters may only be used
to change the behavior of the black box.
The $paramod name mangling is not invertible (the \ character, which
separates the module name from the parameters, is valid in the module
name itself), which does not stop people from trying to invert it.
This commit makes it easy to invert the name mangling by storing
the original name explicitly, and fixes the firrtl backend to use
the newly introduced attribute.
whitequark
Claire Wolf
David Shah
Eddie Hung
diego
Claire Wolf
Alberto Gonzalez