Table of Contents

  1. Overview
  2. What are FireSim and Chipyard?
  3. Tutorial Schedule
  4. Attendee Logistics/Requirements
  5. Registration

Overview

We’re running a full-day tutorial on FireSim and Chipyard at ISCA 2021!

Attendees will learn how to customize an industry and silicon-proven RISC-V microprocessor design, how to run their own high-performance FPGA-accelerated simulations of their design in the cloud, and how to push their design to silicon, guided by the FireSim and Chipyard developers. See the tentative schedule below for more details.

What are FireSim and Chipyard?

Chipyard is a one-stop shop for generating complex RISC-V SoCs, including in-order and out-of-order processors, uncore components, vector co-processors, and other kinds of accelerators. Users can customize any component of the system and push it through automated ASIC flows (e.g. Hammer), software simulation (e.g. Verilator and VCS), and FPGA-accelerated simulation flows (e.g. FireSim) to enable agile end-to-end computer architecture research with a single re-usable toolchain.

FireSim is an open-source FPGA-accelerated simulation framework that can simulate designs built in Chipyard and deploy them to cloud FPGAs, running complex software stacks (e.g. Linux + applications) at 100s of MHz. FireSim simulations exactly and deterministically model Chipyard designs, matching cycle-by-cycle bit-by-bit behavior of the design as if it were taped out in silicon. I/Os like DRAM, UART, and Ethernet are also modeled cycle-accurately, allowing users to model complex systems, including large clusters, beyond the capabilities of test-chips.

Together, Chipyard and FireSim bridge the gap between open-hardware and architecture research, automating many common tasks of architecture and VLSI researchers in a single, easy-to-use platform.

Tutorial Schedule

Time Session Name Speaker Slides
9:00am Introduction/Overview, Logistics Sagar Karandikar PDF
9:05am Chipyard Basics Jerry Zhao PDF
9:35am Building Custom RISC-V SoCs in Chipyard Jerry Zhao PDF
10:05am Integrating Verilog Designs in Chipyard Abraham Gonzalez PDF
10:15am Coffee Break    
10:25am Hammer VLSI Flow Harrison Liew PDF
10:55am FPGA Prototyping Abraham Gonzalez PDF
11:25am FireSim Introduction Sagar Karandikar PDF
11:55am Lunch    
12:45pm Building Hardware Designs in FireSim Sagar Karandikar PDF
1:15pm Building Software Workloads with FireMarshal Nathan Pemberton PDF
1:45pm Running a FireSim Simulation: Password Cracking on a RISC-V SoC with SHA-3 Accelerators and Linux Albert Ou PDF
2:15pm Coffee Break    
2:25pm Debugging and Profiling FireSim-Simulated Designs Alon Amid PDF
2:50pm Conclusion Alon Amid PDF
3:00pm End of Tutorial    

Attendee Logistics/Requirements

No prior experience with FireSim/Chipyard/RISC-V/Chisel is necessary.

Registration

To attend the tutorial, you must register for ISCA 2021.

Stay tuned!

We will continue to update this page as the tutorial is finalized. Join the FireSim mailing list and follow the FireSim Twitter account to stay up-to-date as we finalize the tutorial!