Domain-specific architectures have emerged as a promising solution to meet growing technology demands but with this comes an urgent need to improve hardware methodologies which often have long design cycles, rely on closed source and expensive tools, and have high nonrecurring engineering costs. In this article, we describe how our work developing PyRTL, an open source Python-based Hardware Development Toolkit, has proven to be a powerful agile hardware development and analysis tool with the features to improve current methodologies. We describe how this toolkit-driven approach encourages hardware reuse using modern object-oriented programming features and present an examination of its custom intermediate representation for hardware debugging, analysis, and instrumentation. This approach has proven useful in supporting fast design iteration in a variety of domains including cryptography and machine learning.

中文翻译：

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使用 PyRTL 进行敏捷硬件开发和检测

特定领域架构已成为满足不断增长的技术需求的有前途的解决方案，但随之而来的是迫切需要改进硬件方法，这些方法通常设计周期长、依赖闭源和昂贵的工具，并且具有很高的非经常性工程成本。在本文中，我们描述了我们开发 PyRTL（一种基于 Python 的开源硬件开发工具包）的工作如何被证明是一种强大的敏捷硬件开发和分析工具，具有改进当前方法的功能。我们描述了这种工具包驱动的方法如何使用现代面向对象的编程功能来鼓励硬件重用，并展示了对其用于硬件调试、分析和检测的自定义中间表示的检查。