An Introduction to Filament
These days, everybody wants to design custom hardware and they want to do it quickly. Historically, the go-to tool for that has been an HDL like SystemVerilog or VHDL. Many people (me included) are dissatisfied with this; traditional HDLs provide a very tedious and error-prone programming model. In response, a lot of very smart people have thought up interesting alternatives to traditional HDLs with the goal of making hardware design more accessible and productive (links to come). Here, I'll talk about the one I work on: Filament.
Before we get there, though, we'll work through a small example in Verilog that will highlight the specific problem that we want to solve with Filament.
Let's start small -- we'll design a simple ALU that can support multiplication and addition. I'll be writing my code snippets in Verilog, and I'll explain each step so even if you've never seen an HDL before, you can still follow what we're doing.
Our signature is straightforward: we have 32-bit operands and have a 1-bit control signal to select between multiplication and addition. Let's move on to the first part of the component's body.
