What is Verilog

 What is Verilog?

Verilog HDL is a hardware description language used to design and document electronic systems. Verilog HDL allows designers to design at various levels of abstraction. 

A brief history 

Verilog HDL originated at Automated Integrated Design Systems (later renamed as Gateway  Design Automation) in 1985. The company was privately held at that time by Dr. Prabhu  Goel, the inventor of the PODEM test generation algorithm. Verilog HDL was designed by Phil   Moorby, who was later to become the Chief Designer for Verilog-XL and the first Corporate Fellow at Cadence Design Systems. Gateway Design Automation grew rapidly with the success of Verilog-XL and was finally  acquired by Cadence Design Systems, San Jose, CA in 1989. 

Verilog was invented as simulation language. Use of Verilog for synthesis was a complete  afterthought 

Cadence Design Systems decided to open the language to the public in 1990, and thus OVI  (Open Verilog International) was born. Till that time, Verilog HDL was a proprietary language, being the property of Cadence Design Systems. When OVI was formed in 1991, a number of small companies began working on Verilog  simulators. The first of these came to market in 1992, and now there are mature Verilog  simulators available from several sources. 

As a result, the Verilog market has grown substantially. The market for Verilog related tools in  1994 was well over $75m, making it the most commercially significant hardware description language on the market. 

An IEEE working group was established in 1993 under the Design Automation Sub-Committee  to produce the IEEE Verilog standard 1364. Verilog became IEEE Standard 1364 in 1995.

The Verilog Standard was revised in 2001 and it became IEEE Standard 1364-2001

WHAT IS SYNTHESIS IN DIGITAL DESIGN

 Synthesis

Synthesis: It is a process to map and optimizing higher level HDL description to technology cells (gates, flip flops etc.)

Synthesis Flow Diagram:

HDL Description: This is description of design in Verilog. One has to use subset of constructs as synthesis tools does not support all of them.

Technology Library: This file contains functional description and other information related to area and speed for all the cells of particular technology.

Here "technology" means information about particular process for particular vendor. For example Company X, Standard Cell, 0.18 micron, Y Process, Z Type.

Constraints: This optional file contains information about physical expectations from design. For example speed and area.

Netlist: A netlist is a text file description of a physical connection of components.

Reports: This optional output file contains physical performance of design in terms of speed and area.

Schematic: Some tools provide the facility to view netlist in terms of schematics for better understanding of design and to match the results with the expectations.

Simple example:
Following trivial example explains the Synthesis process. In this example only always procedural statement is used.

module test (out, in1, in2); // behavioral description
  input in1, in2;
  output out;
  reg out;
  reg temp;                 // temporary register

  always@(in1 or in2) begin
    temp = ~in2;
    out = ~in1 ^ temp;  // I am trying to have exor with inverted 
  end                   // inputs
endmodule

after synthesis one gets following "netlist" in verilog. Note that XOR2 is module picked up from technology library. It will be different for different libraries.

module add ( out , in1 , in2 );  // netlist

    output out ;
    input in1 ;
    input in2 ;

    XOR2   instance_name (.Y (out ),.A (in1 ),.B (in2 ) );

endmodule

VERILOG CODE FOR D FLIP FLOP

The Verilog beginners need examples of simple building blocks to learn coding techniques. Now  we will go through different implementation of D FLIP FLOP

=========================================================================

1.Simple D FLIP FLOP 

module dff (data, clock, q);
    // port list
    input   data, clock;
    output  q;

    // reg / wire declaration for outputs / inouts     
    reg     q;

    // logic begins here
    always @(posedge clock) 
        q <= data;
endmodule

========================================================================

2. D Type Flip-flop with asynchronous reset

module dff_async (data, clock, reset, q);

    // port list
    input   data, clock, reset;
    output  q;

    // reg / wire declaration for outputs / inouts
    reg     q;

    // reg / wire declaration for internal signals

    // logic begins here
    always @(posedge clock or negedge reset)
        if(reset == 1'b0)
            q <= 1'b0;
        else 
            q <= data;
endmodule

=======================================================================

3. D Type Flip-flop with Synchronous reset

module dff_sync (data, clock, reset, q);
    // port list
    input   data, clock, reset;
    output  q;

    // reg / wire declaration for outputs / inouts
    reg     q;

    // reg / wire declaration for internal signals

    // logic begins here
    always @(posedge clock) 
        if(reset == 1'b0)
            q <= 1'b0;
        else 
            q <= data;
endmodule

================================================================================

4.D Type Flip-flop with asynchronous reset and clock enable

module dff_cke (data, clock, reset, cke, q);
    // port list
    input   data, clock, reset, cke;
    output  q;

    // reg / wire declaration for outputs / inouts
    reg     q;

    // logic begins here
    always @(posedge clock or negedge reset) 
        if (reset == 0)
            q <= 1'b0;
        else if (cke == 1'b1)
            q <= data;
endmodule

Data flow modeling

Dataflow modeling is a higher level of abstraction. The designer no need have any knowledge of logic circuit. He should be aware of data flow of the design. The gate level modeling becomes very complex for a VLSI circuit. Hence dataflow modeling became a very important way of implementing the design.
In dataflow modeling most of the design is implemented using continuous assignments, which are used to drive a value onto a net. The continuous assignments are made using the keyword assign.

The assign statement

The assign statement is used to make continuous assignment in the dataflow modeling. The assign statement usage is given below:

assign out = vs0 + vs1; // vs0 + vs1 is evaluated and then assigned to out.

• The LHS of assign statement must always be a scalar or vector net or a concatenation. It cannot be a register.
• Continuous statements are always active statements.
• Registers or nets or function calls can come in the RHS of the assignment.
• The RHS expression is evaluated whenever one of its operands changes. Then the result is assigned to the LHS.
• Delays can be specified.

Examples:

assign vs[3:0] = vs0[3:0] & vs1[3:0];

assign {o3, o2, o1, o0} = vs0[3:0] | {vs1[2:0],vs2}; // Use of concatenation.

Implicit Net Declaration:

wire vs0, vs1;
assign out = vs0 ^ vs1;

In the above example out is undeclared, but verilog makes an implicit net declaration for out.

Implicit Continuous Assignment:

wire out = vs0 ^ vs1;

The above line is the implicit continuous assignment. It is same as,

wire out;
assign out = in0 ^ in1;

Delays

There are three types of delays associated with dataflow modeling. They are: Normal/regular assignment delay, implicit continuous assignment delay and net declaration delay.

Normal/regular assignment delay:

assign #10 out = in0 | in1;

If there is any change in the operands in the RHS, then RHS expression will be evaluated after 10 units of time. Lets say that at time t, if there is change in one of the operands in the above example, then the expression is calculated at t+10 units of time. The value of RHS operands present at time t+10 is used to evaluate the expression.

Implicit continuous assignment delay:

wire #10 out = vs0 ^ vs1;

is same as

wire out;
assign 10 out = vs0 ^ vs1;

Net declaration delay:

wire #10 out;
assign out = vs;

is same as

wire out;
assign #10 out = vs;

CHISEL:Combinational circuits

Chisel uses the boolean algebra operators and arithmetic operators same as in c, java, scala, etc programming languages.

val sel = a & b

The keyword val is part of scala which is used to name the variables that have values that won’t change. And here it is used to name the chisel wire, sel, holding the output of the bitwise and operation. A signal can also first be defined as a Wire of some type. Afterward, we can assign a value to the wire with the  ‘:=’ update operator.

val sel = Wire(UInt()))
sel := a & b

Boolean operators

& —– represents bitwise AND operator
val and = a & b
| —– represents bitwise OR operator
val or = a | b
^ —– represents bitwise XOR operator
val xor = a ^ b
~ —– represents bitwise negation
val not = ~a

Arithmetic operations

+ —– Addition operation
val add = a + b
– —– Subtraction operation
val sub = a – b
* —– multiplication operation
val mul = a * b
/ —– division operation
val div = a / b
% —– modulo operation
val mod = a % b

Operator	Description	Data Types
*        /         %	Multiplication, division, modulus	UInt, SInt
+       –	Addition, subtraction	UInt, SInt
===      =/=	Equal, not equal	UInt, SInt, returns Bool
>    >=    <=	Comparison operations	UInt, SInt, returns Bool
<<      >>	Shift left, shift right	UInt, SInt
~	NOT	UInt, SInt, Bool
&        |        ^	AND, OR, XOR	UInt, SInt, Bool
!	Logical NOT	Bool
&&      ||	Logical AND, OR	Bool

Chisel defined hardware operators are show above

CHISEL

Chisel (Constructing Hardware in a Scala Embedded Language)

Is a new hardware language which made open source by UC Berkeley. Chisel supports the advance hardware design using highly parameterized generators and layered domain-specific hardware languages. Chisel provides the flexibility of concepts like object orientation, functional programming, parameterized types and type inference over the VHDL or Verilog hardware languages. Chisel adds hardware construction primitives to the scala programming language, providing designers with power of a modern programming language to write complex, prameterizable circuit generators that produce sythesizble Verilog. With single chisel code, we can generate a high-speed C++ based cycle –accurate software simulator, or low-level Verilog design for ASIC or FPGA for synthesis, place and route.

Chisel is powered by FIRRTL (highly parameterized generators and layered domain-specific hardware languages), a hardware complier that performs optimization of chisel-generated circuits.
Steps involved to generate the Verilog from chisel code

1. The Chisel stage/Font-end compiles chisel to a circuit intermediate representation called FIRRTL(highly parameterized generators and layered domain-specific hardware languages
2. FIRRTL stage/ mid-end then optimizes FIRRTL and then applies user custom transformations
3. Finally the Verilog stage/Backend generated the Verilog based on the optimized FIRRTL.