Top-Down Transaction-Level Design with TL-Verilog

Abstract: Transaction-Level Verilog (TL-Verilog) is an emerging extension to SystemVerilog that supports a new design methodology, called transaction-level design. A transaction, in this methodology, is an entity that moves through structures like pipelines, arbiters, and queues, A transaction might be a machine instruction, a flit of a packet, or a memory read/write. Transaction logic, like packet header decode or instruction execution, that operates on the transaction can be placed anywhere along the transaction's flow. Tools produce the logic to carry signals through their flows to stitch the transaction logic. We implemented a small library of TL-Verilog flow components, and we illustrate the use of these components in a top-down design methodology. We construct a hypothetical microarchitecture simply by instantiating components. Within the flows created by these components, we add combinational transaction logic, enabling verification activities and performance evaluation to begin. We then refine the model by positioning the transaction logic within its flow to produce a high-quality register-transfer-level (RTL) implementation.