News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:The Ice-V: a simple, compact RISC-V RV32I implementation ... by zsmi on Sunday June 20, 2021 @10:09PM (#27575607)
Me too. I was particularly hopeful that they would explain why they decided to not go with systemC as it seems to solve a similar problem but I couldn't find anything.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SystemC

Re:The Ice-V: a simple, compact RISC-V RV32I implementation ... by sylefeb on Monday June 21, 2021 @03:52AM (#27577165)
Hi, Silice author here. I cannot provide a detailed answer as I am not familiar enough with SystemC. I started Silice as a "quality of life" (in the video game sense) thin layer above Verilog, hoping to obtain something that would be more enjoyable to write with. I'd like this to be true both for getting started with FPGA, but also when describing advanced designs with efficiency concerns in mind (LUT count, max perf, hardware specificity such as DSP blocks, etc.).

In many ways Silice is very simple. Just a thin abstraction layer with helpful syntax helpers (groups, interfaces, pipelines, fsm), automating some checks and performing simple optimizations (e.g. flip-flop pruning). But please see the README for all details.

The spirit in which I am developing Silice is "I hope you'll find it useful" and absolutely not "this will be the definitive HDL". First, I am surely not qualified enough to imagine achieving such a goal, and second I am a big believer in having various tools for various problems and various styles.

So I hope you'll find it useful :) I am taking great care in providing a build system to make it easy to get started both in simulation and real FPGA hardware. This relies on many other great projects: yosys, nextpnr, edalize, openfpgaloader, verilator, icarus, ...

Also, Silice comes with fun examples! https://github.com/sylefeb/Silice/tree/master/projects

Re:The Ice-V: a simple, compact RISC-V RV32I implementation ... by zsmi on Monday June 21, 2021 @12:05PM (#27580496)
Thanks for the pointers! I'll definitely take a look.