Hardware Design with a Scripting Language

The Python Hardware Description Language (PyHDL) provides a scripting interface to object-oriented hardware design in C++. PyHDL uses the PamDC and PAM-Blox libraries to generate FPGA circuits. The main advantage of scripting languages is a reduction in development time for high-level designs. We propose a two-step approach: first, use scripting to explore effects of composition and parameterisation; second, convert the scripted designs into compiled components for performance. Our results show that, for small designs, our method offers 5 to 7 times improvement in turnaround time. For a large 10x10 matrix vector multiplier, our method offers respectively 365% and 19% improvement in turnaround time over purely scripting and purely compiled methods.