Comment by dkjaudyeqooe 3 days ago
> Isn't translating between languages something that LLMs should excel at?
No, not at all. Unless there is a large amount of training data relevant to the translation then LLMs are likely just to make up nonsense. Chisel is a very niche hardware description language.
I think it is niche in the sense that it is almost completely unused professionally. Most usage tends to be academic or hobbyist. I don’t mean to imply that it isn’t suitable for professional work, but more that it is not very easy to make work with the industrial EDA tools necessary for fabrication.
SiFive, the leading RISC-V IP vendor, with cores available (at the moment) up to around Cortex-X2 level, has been taping out chips from Chisel since 2016.
Their first chip, a 32 bit microcontroller, ran at 320 MHz on TSC 180nm, while the comparable Arm Cortex-M4 was typically limited to 180 MHz on the same process node.
The EIC7700X, using SiFive P550 cores, given nice solid Core 2 Quad (or Raspbery Pi 4) performance.
SiFive's X280 cores are being used in rad-hard Microchip chips for NASA.
This is not exactly "academic" or "hobby".
SiFive has been founded by "academics", including some of those who have designed Chisel.
So it is no surprise that they have used their pet language.
Except for them, the professional use of Chisel is rare, and the future of SiFive is unclear.
Regardless how good it may be, it is difficult for any hardware-description language to replace the incumbents SystemVerilog and VHDL, because all designers are too dependent on whatever the foundries or the FPGA manufacturers support.
Choosing another language is pretty much impossible, unless you translate it to either SystemVerilog or VHDL. If you do that, then it is hard to justify using another language instead of writing directly in SystemVerilog or VHDL.
Very niche? That's suprising to hear. I'm not in the space, and I know it's not in the big 2/3 (is SystemVerilog distinct from Verilog), but it's been around for 13 years and even DARPA has it on their radar:
> Chisel is mentioned by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as a technology to improve the efficiency of electronic design, where smaller design teams do larger designs. Google has used Chisel to develop a Tensor Processing Unit for edge computing
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chisel_(programming_language)#...