Visual Analytics for Hardware Design

Client: Martin Erhart, SiFive <martin.erhart@sifive.com>

CIRCT recently introduced an open software stack for hardware design, which SiFive has used to build and ship production RISC-V chips. Understanding how hardware designs are optimised and translated to a physical layout is difficult due to the overwhelming amount of data. In this project, you will build a visual data analytics tool that helps hardware compiler engineers analyse the lowering process in detail. We propose to connect the open-source CIRCT (circt.llvm.org) EDA stack with the recently released Google Model Explorer (https://github.com/google-ai-edge/model-explorer) and augment the product with CIRCT-specific interactive analyses, as well as bi-directional analysis-transformations that allow to visualise and influence the compilation process. If successful, your tool will make a complex compilation process visually accessible to a broad community.