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Main Author: Kruszewski, Michał
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.09642
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author Kruszewski, Michał
author_facet Kruszewski, Michał
contents Build systems become an indispensable part of the software implementation and deployment process. New programming languages are released with the build system integrated into the language tools, for example, Go, Rust, or Zig. However, in the hardware description domain, no official build systems have been released with the predominant Hardware Description Languages (HDL) such as VHDL or SystemVerilog. Moreover, hardware design projects are often multilingual. The paper characterizes and compares two common approaches for hardware build system implementations. The first one, the direct-Tcl approach, in which the build system code is executed directly by the EDA tool during the design build flow. The second one, the indirect-abstract approach, in which the build system produces a Tcl script, which is later run by a proper EDA tool. As none of the existing direct-Tcl build systems was close to the indirect-abstract build systems in terms of supported functionalities, the paper also presents a new direct-Tcl hardware build system called HBS. The implemented build system was used as a representative of direct-Tcl build systems in comparison with indirect-abstract build systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_09642
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle HBS -- Hardware Build System: Characterizing and comparing direct-Tcl and indirect-abstract approaches for hardware build systems
Kruszewski, Michał
Systems and Control
Build systems become an indispensable part of the software implementation and deployment process. New programming languages are released with the build system integrated into the language tools, for example, Go, Rust, or Zig. However, in the hardware description domain, no official build systems have been released with the predominant Hardware Description Languages (HDL) such as VHDL or SystemVerilog. Moreover, hardware design projects are often multilingual. The paper characterizes and compares two common approaches for hardware build system implementations. The first one, the direct-Tcl approach, in which the build system code is executed directly by the EDA tool during the design build flow. The second one, the indirect-abstract approach, in which the build system produces a Tcl script, which is later run by a proper EDA tool. As none of the existing direct-Tcl build systems was close to the indirect-abstract build systems in terms of supported functionalities, the paper also presents a new direct-Tcl hardware build system called HBS. The implemented build system was used as a representative of direct-Tcl build systems in comparison with indirect-abstract build systems.
title HBS -- Hardware Build System: Characterizing and comparing direct-Tcl and indirect-abstract approaches for hardware build systems
topic Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.09642