Cement

Cement is a hardware design framework comprising CmtHDL (an embedded HDL in Rust) and CmtC (a compiler with timing analysis and control synthesis). It enables productive FPGA programming while preserving cycle-deterministic behavior and timing awareness.

+----------------------------------------------------------+
|                    Cement Framework                      |
+----------------------------------------------------------+
|                                                          |
|  CmtHDL (Rust)              CmtC Compiler                |
|  +--------------+          +--------------+              |
|  | RTL Layer    |          |  ir-rs       |              |
|  | (ports,wires)|  ----->  |  (SSA IR)    |              |
|  +--------------+          +--------------+              |
|  | Event Layer  |          |  Timing      |              |
|  | (occurrence) |  ----->  |  Analysis    |              |
|  +--------------+          +--------------+              |
|  | Ctrl Sub-lang|          |  Control     |              |
|  | seq/par/if/  |  ----->  |  Synthesis   |  --> Verilog |
|  | for/while    |          |  (State Tree)|              |
|  +--------------+          +--------------+              |
+----------------------------------------------------------+

The FPGA Programming Gap

Existing approaches force tradeoffs: HDLs lack timing awareness, HLS lacks determinism, DSLs limit expressiveness. Cement achieves all three.

Event-Based Extension

CmtHDL extends standard RTL with two key innovations:

Event Layer - Events guard hardware behavior with timing information:

let receive = event! {
    resend.i %= arbiter.resend;  // connection
    sel_reg.wr %= arbiter.sel;   // operation
};

Ctrl Sub-Language - Procedural statements specify deterministic timing:

let pipeline = stmt! {
    seq { send; wait; receive; xbar; }  // 4 stages, sequential
};
synth!(pipeline, Pipeline::new(clk, go, /*II=*/1));

Six statement types: step, seq, par, if, for, while - each with deterministic latency rules.

CmtC Compiler

• ir-rs: Pure-Rust IR framework inspired by MLIR, with SSA operations
• Timing Analysis: Static analysis detects violations at elaboration; dynamic monitoring catches data-dependent issues in simulation
• Control Synthesis: State tree representation optimizes FSM encoding (balancing LUT vs FF usage)

Results

On PolyBench benchmarks vs Vitis HLS and Dahlia-Calyx:

• 1.41×-3.49× speedup with cycle-deterministic scheduling
• 23%-82% resource savings from optimized control synthesis
• Comparable LoC to HLS (0.97× geomean)

Case study on systolic arrays: 51% LUT savings, 13% throughput improvement vs prior work, with 2 person-months development (vs 6 for Chisel-based EMS).

Links

• GitHub - Rust version
• GitHub - MLIR/CIRCT version