Upcoming changes to the Architectural Composition Engine

[Viveca Pannell]

Hello all,

Looking forward, there are a number of changes we from ZeroRISC would like to make to Pavona's hardware and software generation tools, known collectively as ACE (the Architectural Composition Engine).

The most important thing is making it usable by a greater variety of users, and there are a number of steps that we would like to take to achieve this. In its current state, ACE is difficult to use outside of the repo, and a number of challenges prevent it from generating collateral for a wider variety of systems (i.e., beyond the current example tops, Egret and Dragonfly). We plan on adding updates that will enable ACE to accommodate more general needs.

The vision is that ACE, at the end of this development effort:

• correctly composes arbitrary combinations of hardware blocks together as a top
• generates appropriate DV, software, and documentation per top
• runs on a variety of user environments
• is configurable and extensible to individual user needs
• can be discovered and understood easily

We have staged a couple "logical first-step" draft PRs and welcome more specific feedback on these threads:

https://github.com/pavona/pavona/pull/279 - makes the top generation flow more modular
https://github.com/pavona/pavona/pull/306 - exposes requirements for configuring tops in a more visible place

We invite feedback from the community as we begin developing these updates. Please let us know what you think and feel free to suggest other improvements to make!

Respectfully,

Viveca Pannell

ZeroRISC