Soft connections: addressing the hardware-design modularity problem

  • Authors:
  • Michael Pellauer;Michael Adler;Derek Chiou;Joel Emer

  • Affiliations:
  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology;Intel Corporation;University of Texas at Austin;Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Intel Corporation

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 46th Annual Design Automation Conference
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Hardware-design languages typically impose a rigid communication hierarchy that follows module instantiation. This leads to an undesirable side-effect where changes to a child's interface result in changes to the parents. Soft connections address this problem by allowing the user to specify connection endpoints that are automatically connected at compilation time, rather than by the user.