WAL: a novel waveform analysis language for advanced design understanding and debugging

Description

Starting points for design understanding and debugging are generated waveforms. However, waveform viewing is still a highly manual and tedious process, and unfortunately, there has been no progress for automating the analysis of waveforms. Therefore, we introduce the Waveform Analysis Language (WAL) in this paper. We realized WAL as a Domain Specific Language (DSL). This design choice has many advantages ranging from a natural expressiveness of an waveform analysis problem to providing an Intermediate Representation (IR) well-suited as a compilation target from other languages. We evaluate WAL in two major case studies. This includes (i) a WAL-based communication analyzer reporting for example throughput or latency of AXI communication and (ii) the generation of the instruction flow in the pipeline and the extraction the software basic blocks of a RISC-V processor via WAWK, which is based on the WAL-IR to make complex waveform analysis as easy as searching in text files.

Period	19 Jan 2022
Event title	Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASP-DAC)
Event type	Conference
Location	AustriaShow on map