Hi all Various working groups were formed at the 2011 CASPER workshop. One of these were for the toolflow, libraries, software etc. Various decisions and actions were decided. This is a list.
1. Test Suite The current library test suite is to be updated. The current bit-for-bit tests will continue to be used where appropriate and new tests developed to test data quality for other, especially high-level, blocks. Examples for these test types would be accumulators for bit-for-bit tests and FFTs for performance tests. Each block added to the library would need to have associated to allow proof of correct operation and any bug fix should include a test that would expose this bug in future which might be added to existing tests. Any changes/fixes to library blocks will require that the appropriate tests be run and correct operation proved before changes are made to the main repository. 2. Github The main CASPER library repository will be moved to github. 3. More frequent mailing list updates on library work Work on the libraries and toolflow will be communicated more often to the CASPER community via the mailing list. Information on bugfixes or large improvements/changes will be sent out immediately. A list of smaller changes will be sent out once the list is long or after a month or so has elapsed. 4. Move to more recent Xilinx/Matlab distribution The recommended Xilinx/Matlab distributions will be updated in the next few months. 5. BORPH A memory mapped interface will replace BORPH in tcpborphserver. This should improve performance when using katcp. BORPH will continue to run for those running code natively on the PowerPC. This change should not be noticeable (besides higher performance). 6. xBlocks There is a large ongoing effort in moving the DSP libraries to xBlocks. Included in this are significant optimisations in terms of resource usage. Development in mlib_devel will be frozen and, once sufficient testing is performed using the new test suite, the mlib_devel library will be deprecated in favour of the xBlocks based library. 7. git FAQ A git FAQ wiki page is to be set up, serving library developers especially 8. Error coverage Parameter type and range checking is to be more intensively implemented. 9. Deprecated libraries/blocks The gavrt library and other blocks are to be deprecated and useful blocks extracted to the xBlocks library. 10. New toolflow As an initial move to a new toolflow, a library of primitives is to be created in verilog. This will be used as the basis in the future toolflow. Regards Andrew
