Li(sp)Monade (Simulisp) 0.2

A very basic processor simulated at the logic gate level, based on an experimental Lisp machine architecture brought back from the dead, and designed using copious amounts of Haskell.

This is actually a school project for a hardware architecture course at Ecole Normale Supérieure.

Contents:

• Some tools to simulate synchronous digital circuits written in a simple netlist language
• An emulator for the processor (in imperative-style OCaml)
• A high-level hardware description language embedded in Haskell, inspired by Lava
• A toolset to write the microcode
• A Mini-Lisp compiler and an assembler

Installation

Requirements

• Haskell Platform >= 2013.2.0.0, including the GHC compiler >= 7.6 and the Parsec and Vector packages
• (For the simulator's clock-mode) hsSDL >= 0.6.5
• (For the emulator only) OCaml >= 4.00

Building

The easy way to build the complete project is use

./build.sh

Be patient! Compilation can take a few minutes. If you are in a hurry you can delete the -O2 options in the file ./haskell/simulisp.cabal

The script will also briefly explains you how to test the clock program.

If you prefer a more hands-on way :

We use Cabal as our build system.

cd ./simulisp/haskell
cabal configure
cabal build

The binaries generated are:

• the simulator in dist/build/simulator/simulator
• a program to generate the netlist of the processor in dist/build/generate-processor/generate-processor
• a program to generate the microprogram of the processor in dist/build/generate-microprogram/generate-microprogram
• a program to generate the binary file of the clock in dist/build/clock-program/clock-program

You can build the rom file in the good form using the script :

  ./generateRom.sh

It uses the last two binaries which we just presented.

Simulator usage

To simulate juste one step: ./simulator --input=var1:(val1)+,...,vari:(vali)+ <netlist file name>

To simulate n steps by feeding n inputs to the program through a file: ./simulator --finput=<input file name> <netlist file name>

More information: ./simulator --help

Structure of input files

var ::= string                                                        
val ::= binary number                                                 
                                                                      
assign ::= var ':' number                                             
                                                                      
line ::= assign                                                     
       | assign ',' line                                            
                                                                      
file ::= line                                                        
       | line '\n' file                                              

Semantics:

• the nth line describes the inputs for the nth simulation step
• a line is a comma-separated sequence of assignments of the form variable:value

WARNING: All the required inputs of your Netlists must be described in your input file.

Structure of ROM files

A succession of lines, each of which is of the type

<ID of the ROM chip in the netlist>:<contents in binary>