ChiselVerify: An Open-Source Hardware Verification Library for Chisel and Scala

Abstract

Modern digital hardware is becoming ever more complex. The development of different application-specific accelerators rather than traditional general purpose processors calls for advanced development methods not only for design, but equally so for subsequent verification. Recently, this has made engineers propose an agile hardware development flow. However, one of the main obstacles when proposing such a method is the lack of efficient tools. Chisel, a high-level hardware construction language, was introduced in order to combat this lack. Since this already enables agile hardware design, we instead focus our attention on the verification flow. Thus, this paper proposes ChiselVerify, an open-source library for verifying circuits described in Chisel. It builds on top of Chisel and uses Scala to drive the verification process. The solution is well integrated into the existing Chisel universe, making it an extension of currently existing testing libraries.