Tuesday, September 26, 2017

Generate custom Chisel bundle using meta programming

I found the example to extend a Bundle's functionality limiting.  You need to pass a varargs of (String,Data) tuple to the function.  Here's a snippet:

 final class CustomBundle(elts: (String, Data)*) extends Record {
    val elements = ListMap(elts map { case (field, elt) => field -> elt.chiselCloneType }: _*)
    def apply(elt: String): Data = elements(elt)
    override def cloneType = (new CustomBundle(elements.toList: _*)).asInstanceOf[this.type]
  }

I could have found a solution using the above (not sure, is it possible to convert ListMap to varargs?), but I dug into Scala meta programming for the purpose of ramp.  Behold!  Here's an alternative (though incomplete) method of generating a bundle.

object MetaBundle {
  import reflect.runtime.currentMirror
  import tools.reflect.ToolBox
  val toolbox = currentMirror.mkToolBox()
  import toolbox.u._

  def apply(): Bundle = {
    val tree =
      q"""
          import chisel3.core._
          val b = new Bundle {
            // placeholder for your interface
            val i = Input(UInt(1.W))
            val o = Output(UInt(1.W))
          }
          b
       """    
     toolbox.eval(tree).asInstanceOf[Bundle]
  }
}

The code above returns an instance of a typeless bundle.  The result isn't equivalent to above, but serves my purpose.  Have yet to try, but suspect the technique can be extended to other cases.  There's likely implications wrt. statically typed nature of Scala.  Use at your own risk.  I am only posting this because it's a neat hack.

No comments:

Post a Comment