Modular design is a key challenge for enabling large-scale reuse of hardware modules. Unlike software, however, hardware designs correspond to physical circuits and inherit constraints from them. Timing constraints—which cycle a signal arrives, when an input is read—and structural constraints—how often a multiplier accepts new inputs—are fundamental to hardware interfaces. Existing hardware design languages do not provide a way to encode these constraints; a user must read documentation, build scripts, or in the worst case, a module’s implementation to understand how to use it. We present Filament, a language for modular hardware design that supports the specification and enforcement of timing and structural constraints for statically scheduled pipelines. Filament usestimeline types, which describe the intervals of clock-cycle time when a given signal is available or required. Filament enablessafe compositionof hardware modules, ensures that the resulting designs are correctly pipelined, and predictably lowers them to efficient hardware.

@article{paperbot1969,
  title = {Modular Hardware Design with Timeline Types},
  author = {Rachit Nigam and Pedro Henrique Azevedo de Amorim and Adrian Sampson},
  journal = {Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages},
  volume = {7},
  number = {PLDI},
  year = {2023},
  doi = {10.1145/3591234}
}