Border Patrol logo, a Border Collie

Type-Systems for Describing System-on-a-Chip Architectures.

Posted on July 12, 2018

Categories: idris, soc, hardware, linear-types, dependent-types, border-patrol, tdd, pl-interest, glasgow, talks

Jan gave about his work on the Border Patrol Project at the University of Edinburgh, School of Informatics, PL-Interest Group.

This extends upon his talk from March to the FP-Group at St Andrews with a more complete picture of the language and how it is used. Sadly, this talk won’t be Chalk&Talk, and a more conventional slidedeck will be used.

The protocols that describe the interactions between IP Cores on System-on-a-Chip (SoC) architectures are well-documented. Describing not only the structural properties of the physical interfaces but also the behaviour of the emanating signals. However, there is a disconnect between the design of SoC architectures, their formal description, and the verification of their implementation in known hardware description languages.

Within the Border Patrol project we are investigating how to capture and reason about the structural and behavioural properties of SoC architectures using state-of-the-art advances in programming language research. Namely, we are investigating using dependent types and session types to capture and reason about hardware communication at design and runtime.

In this talk I will discuss my work in designing a dependent type- system and corresponding languages that captures and reasons about the topological structure of a System-on-a-Chip. These languages provide correct-by-construction guarantees over:

  • the physical structure of an interaction protocol;
  • the adherence of a component’s interface to a given protocol; and
  • the validity of the specified connections made between components.

We provide these guarantees through the (ab)use of dependent types as presented in Idris; and abuse of parameterised monads to reason about resource usage.

Slides are not available.