Technical talk at STAC Summit Tokyo

Frameshift’s Chris Harris delivered a technical talk at the Tokyo STAC summit on the 18th Septmeber at the Tokyo Stock Exchange:

Silicon Vale of Tears: Why Hardware Needs Better Languages

Most FPGA development is still done in Verilog or VHDL, by engineers from electronics backgrounds. But to those from the software world, writing complex hardware in Verilog feels much like writing a major program purely in assembly code. High-Level Synthesis offers limited relief and comes with its own issues. The solution to our problems already exists: typed functional languages like Haskell and Scala are the right conceptual match for hardware design — and tools like Clash are starting to show why. This talk explores the case for writing hardware as though it were software, our experience using Clash in production, how it compares to Verilog and C++ HLS, and what’s holding the industry back from using the abstractions that it needs, but doesn’t necessarily want.