Towards a Hardware DSL Ecosystem : RubyRTL and Friends

Abstract: For several years, hardware design has been undergoing a surprising revival: fueled by open source initiatives, various tools and architectures have recently emerged. This resurgence also involves new hardware description languages. Inspired by the Migen Python community, we present RubyRTL, a novel internal domain-specific language for hardware design embedded in the Ruby language. Ruby -- which is best known in the field of web design -- has proven to be an excellent solution for the design of such DSLs, because of its meta-programming features. This paper presents the main aspects of RubyRTL, along with illustrating examples. We also propose a language-neutral interchange format, named Sexpir, that allows to seamlessly exchange RTL designs between Migen Python DSL and RubyRTL. This paves the way for interactions between various agile communities in the field of open source hardware design.