Technology Mapping¶
Previous chapters outlined how HDL code is transformed into an RTL netlist. The RTL netlist is still based on abstract coarse-grain cell types like arbitrary width adders and even multipliers. This chapter covers how an RTL netlist is transformed into a functionally equivalent netlist utilizing the cell types available in the target architecture.
Technology mapping is often performed in two phases. In the first phase RTL cells are mapped to an internal library of single-bit cells (see Sec. [sec:celllib_gates]). In the second phase this netlist of internal gate types is transformed to a netlist of gates from the target technology library.
When the target architecture provides coarse-grain cells (such as block ram or ALUs), these must be mapped to directly form the RTL netlist, as information on the coarse-grain structure of the design is lost when it is mapped to bit-width gate types.
Cell Substitution¶
The simplest form of technology mapping is cell substitution, as
performed by the techmap pass. This pass, when provided with a
Verilog file that implements the RTL cell types using simpler cells,
simply replaces the RTL cells with the provided implementation.
When no map file is provided, techmap uses a built-in map file that
maps the Yosys RTL cell types to the internal gate library used by
Yosys. The curious reader may find this map file as
techlibs/common/techmap.v in the Yosys source tree.
Additional features have been added to techmap to allow for
conditional mapping of cells (see help techmap or
Sec. [cmd:techmap]). This can for example be useful
if the target architecture supports hardware multipliers for certain
bit-widths but not for others.
A usual synthesis flow would first use the techmap pass to directly
map some RTL cells to coarse-grain cells provided by the target
architecture (if any) and then use techmap with the built-in default
file to map the remaining RTL cells to gate logic.
Subcircuit Substitution¶
Sometimes the target architecture provides cells that are more powerful than the RTL cells used by Yosys. For example a cell in the target architecture that can calculate the absolute-difference of two numbers does not match any single RTL cell type but only combinations of cells.
For these cases Yosys provides the extract pass that can match a
given set of modules against a design and identify the portions of the
design that are identical (i.e. isomorphic subcircuits) to any of the
given modules. These matched subcircuits are then replaced by instances
of the given modules.
The extract pass also finds basic variations of the given modules,
such as swapped inputs on commutative cell types.
In addition to this the extract pass also has limited support for
frequent subcircuit mining, i.e. the process of finding recurring
subcircuits in the design. This has a few applications, including the
design of new coarse-grain architectures
.
The hard algorithmic work done by the extract pass (solving the
isomorphic subcircuit problem and frequent subcircuit mining) is
performed using the SubCircuit library that can also be used stand-alone
without Yosys (see Sec. [sec:SubCircuit]).
Gate-Level Technology Mapping¶
On the gate-level the target architecture is usually described by a “Liberty file”. The Liberty file format is an industry standard format that can be used to describe the behaviour and other properties of standard library cells .
Mapping a design utilizing the Yosys internal gate library (e.g. as a
result of mapping it to this representation using the techmap pass)
is performed in two phases.
First the register cells must be mapped to the registers that are available on the target architectures. The target architecture might not provide all variations of d-type flip-flops with positive and negative clock edge, high-active and low-active asynchronous set and/or reset, etc. Therefore the process of mapping the registers might add additional inverters to the design and thus it is important to map the register cells first.
Mapping of the register cells may be performed by using the
dfflibmap pass. This pass expects a Liberty file as argument (using
the -liberty option) and only uses the register cells from the
Liberty file.
Secondly the combinational logic must be mapped to the target
architecture. This is done using the external program ABC via the
abc pass by using the -liberty option to the pass. Note that in
this case only the combinatorial cells are used from the cell library.
Occasionally Liberty files contain trade secrets (such as sensitive
timing information) that cannot be shared freely. This complicates
processes such as reporting bugs in the tools involved. When the
information in the Liberty file used by Yosys and ABC are not part of
the sensitive information, the additional tool yosys-filterlib (see
Sec. [sec:filterlib]) can be used to strip the
sensitive information from the Liberty file.