In canal, the hardware is represented as a directed graph (DiGraph). In principle each node in the graph
will be turn into a hardware component based on the property of the node. The edge will be transformed
into a wire.
One thing to notice is that staged generation happens on the graph level. That is, passes have to be operated
on the DiGraph, rather than the hardware generator itself. This allows better analysis and reduce the computation
overhead since magma is slow when constructing large hardware. In canal, different bit width routing
network will have different DiGraph by design. This allows us to share the common passes on different DiGraph
while constructing on the same interconnect
pip install .
Due to the magma backend, Python 3.7.2+ is required to install canal
The internal DiGraph representation is identical to Cyclone. Due to the requirement of pure-Python implementation,
canal re-implemented the graph representation with more utility functions. The PnR information is interchangeable
with Thunder and Cyclone and thus can be used in place route directly.
There is a python utility package called archipelago, that can take Interconnect object in canal and perform
place and route directly. To install archipelago, you can use
pip install archipelago
It will use pre-built Python native wheels to speed up place and route.
A new kratos-based of canal is here.