Paper 7: Top-Down Transaction-Level Design with TL-Verilog

Transaction-Level Verilog (TL-Verilog) is an emerging extension to SystemVerilog that supports transaction-level design methodology. In transaction-level design, a ​transaction is an entity that moves through a microarchitecture. It is operated upon and steered through the machinery by flow components such as pipelines, arbiters, and queues. A transaction might be a machine instruction, a flit of a packet, or a memory read/write. The flow of a transaction can be established independently from the logic that operates on the transaction. We present a preliminary library of TL-Verilog flow components that can be quickly stitched together to establish a complete microarchitecture. We show how transaction logic, like packet decoding, can be added within this flow.

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RISC-V waterfall diagram and hazards

The above waterfall diagram is representing a sequence of instructions that are fetched from memory and how they progress to the various stages of pipeline. In the above diagram you got program counter (P), fetch (F), decode (D), register read (R), execute (E) and register write (W). We fetch one instruction at a time. Potentially, you can fetch multiple instructions at a time, which would be a super-scalar architecture.

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