A Vertically Integrated Framework for Templatized Chip Design

2025-12-10

AI Summary

Software developers face significant challenges integrating custom hardware—such as AI accelerators—into applications, primarily due to high hardware design expertise requirements and a fundamental abstraction mismatch between software and hardware layers. Method: This paper introduces an end-to-end chip auto-generation methodology tailored for software developers. It accepts high-level object-oriented specifications as input and establishes a one-to-one mapping between software objects and physical chip regions to ensure abstraction consistency. We propose the novel “software–chip structural alignment” paradigm, coupled with object-aligned floorplanning, vertically integrated IP modular construction, and formal verification of hardware interactions via a sequence-based type system. Contribution/Results: The approach enables novice developers to produce synthesizable chip designs while guaranteeing semantic consistency between software behavior and hardware implementation, as well as correctness of hardware communication. It substantially lowers the domain-specific knowledge barrier for hardware design without compromising functional fidelity or correctness guarantees.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Hardware-aware ML
• Humans and AI: Game Design — Virtual Humans, NPCs and Autonomous Characters
• Application Domains: Software Engineering

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Applied ML and AI for Web-based mobile applications
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Economic ramifications for generative AI infrastructure and applications
• Semantics and Knowledge: Methods to enhance, augment, integrate or synergize semantic models such as knowledge graphs and LLMs

Abstract

Developers who primarily engage with software often struggle to incorporate custom hardware into their applications, even though specialized silicon can provide substantial benefits to machine learning and AI, as well as to the application domains that they enable. This work investigates how a chip can be generated from a high-level object-oriented software specification, targeting introductory-level chip design learners with only very light performance requirements, while maintaining mental continuity between the chip layout and the software source program. In our approach, each software object is represented as a corresponding region on the die, producing a one-to-one structural mapping that preserves these familiar abstractions throughout the design flow. To support this mapping, we employ a modular construction strategy in which vertically composed IP blocks implement the behavioral protocols expressed in software. A direct syntactic translation, however, cannot meet hardware-level efficiency or communication constraints. For this reason, we leverage formal type systems based on sequences that check whether interactions between hardware modules adhere to the communication patterns described in the software model. We further examine hardware interconnect strategies for composing many such modules and develop layout techniques suited to this object-aligned design style. Together, these contributions preserve mental continuity from software to chip design for new learners and enables practical layout generation, ultimately reducing the expertise required for software developers to participate in chip creation.

Problem

• Generates chips from high-level software specifications for learners
• Maps software objects to die regions maintaining design continuity
• Uses formal type systems to ensure hardware communication adherence

Innovation

• Mapping software objects to chip regions for structural continuity
• Using formal type systems to verify hardware communication patterns
• Developing object-aligned layout techniques for modular chip composition