Chisel and cocotb Examples

Example designs of Chisel and cocotb for Agile Hardware Design and Verification.

Requirements

This repository requires sbt, g++, and verilator (see below). User can use gtkwave to view vcd files.

Installation of verilator > 5.*

curl -L -O https://github.com/YosysHQ/oss-cad-suite-build/releases/download/2023-08-01/oss-cad-suite-linux-x64-20230801.tgz
tar xzf oss-cad-suite-linux-x64-20230801.tgz

Add oss-cad-suite/bin to your PATH.

Install the following Python packages for cocotb

python3 -m venv .venv              # create a Python3 virtual environment (preferably > python 3.9.x)
source .venv/bin/activate          # activate virtual environment

pip install --upgrade pip          # required packages
pip install pytest
pip install cocotb
pip install cocotb-test

Execute Chisel tests

• Build and test Chisel modules using sbt:

sbt compile
sbt run
sbt test

Execute cocotb tests:

cd tests_cocotb/acc_component/
cocotb-clean
pytest -vv

Alternate execution environment using a container:

Build a container:

The container recipe is given in docker/Dockerfile. It enumerates all the required packages and libraries for this project.

Install apptainer on a machine where you have root access. See instructions at the following link: https://apptainer.org/docs/admin/main/installation.html#install-ubuntu-packages

Also install Singularity Python: https://singularityhub.github.io/singularity-cli/ which will help convert Docker recipes into Singularity recipes and vice versa.

Execute the following commands to build the container:

1. cd docker/
2. spython recipe Dockerfile &> Singularity.def
3. sudo apptainer build mycontainer.sif Singularity.def

The generated mycontainer.sif file should be between 512 MB - 1 GB in size. It can be moved to a different machine and run even without root access.

Activate the container

Execute the following command to open a terminal using the .sif file:

apptainer shell -B /path/to/this/repo/:/mnt <path-to-mycontainer.sif>

This will create an Apptainer prompt. cd /mnt to access and execute Chisel and cocotb tests within the container. Run exit to exit from the container prompt.

Note: Inside the container environemnt, if you see a java FileSystemException issue, unset XDG_RUNTIME_DIR.