Calyx

Calyx is a shared compiler infrastructure accelerating the development of specialized hardware accelerators. Calyx simplifies the encoding of high-level semantics and automatically optimizes programs when being lowered to synthesizable designs. Calyx is written in Rust, and utilizes tools built in Python, Bash, and Verilog.

I’ve worked with Rachit Nigam and Adrian Sampson for over two years, to show that complex communication protocols can be implemented in Calyx. Implementing such protocols in a high-level language such as Calyx helps reason about implementations, and avoids common bugs that exist even in vendors’ own examples.

My most recent work was on creating push-button workflows that enables executing programs on FPGAs via by generating AXI controllers implemented in Calyx.

View Calyx on GitHub

Contributions

• AXI Wrapper generator dynamically produces wrappers for arbitrary Calyx programs that allows these programs to be run on Xilinx FPGAs.
• Calyx AXI Wrapper generator creates AXI controllers for arbitrary Calyx programs, implemented in Calyx.
• Cocotb testbenches verify the correctness of said AXI wrappers and are incorporated in Calyx’s CI suite. The custom testbench simulates AXI transactions with dynamically generated AXI wrappers and outputs are compared with expected baseline results.
• fud is a Calyx toolchain driver that pipelines compilation execution stages. Fud includes a number of pipelines that assist with executing programs on FPGAs utilizing tools such as Vitis and XRT.