Tydi is an open specification for streaming dataflow designs in digital circuits, allowing designers to express how composite and variable-length data structures are transferred over streams using clear, data-centric types. These data types are extensively used in a many application domains, such as big data and SQL applications. This way, Tydi provides a higher-level method for defining interfaces between components as opposed to existing bit and byte-based interface specifications. In this paper, we introduce an open-source intermediate representation (IR) which allows for the declaration of Tydi's types. The IR enables creating and connecting components with Tydi Streams as interfaces, called Streamlets. It also lets backends for synthesis and simulation retain high-level information, such as documentation. Types and Streamlets can be easily reused between multiple projects, and Tydi's streams and type hierarchy can be used to define interface contracts, which aid collaboration when designing a larger system. The IR codifies the rules and properties established in the Tydi specification and serves to complement computation-oriented hardware design tools with a data-centric view on interfaces. To support different backends and targets, the IR is focused on expressing interfaces, and complements behavior described by hardware description languages and other IRs. Additionally, a testing syntax for the verification of inputs and outputs against abstract streams of data, and for substituting interdependent components, is presented which allows for the specification of behavior. To demonstrate this IR, we have created a grammar, parser, and query system, and paired these with a backend targeting VHDL.

翻译：Tydi 是一种用于数字电路中流式数据流设计的开放规范，使设计者能够通过清晰、以数据为中心的类型，表达复合和可变长度数据结构如何在流上进行传输。这些数据类型广泛应用于大数据和SQL应用等多个领域。由此，Tydi 提供了一种比现有基于比特和字节的接口规范更高级的方法，用于定义组件之间的接口。在本文中，我们介绍了一种开源中间表示（IR），该表示允许声明 Tydi 的类型。该 IR 能够创建和连接以 Tydi 流作为接口的组件，称为 Streamlets。它还能让用于综合和仿真的后端保留高层次信息，例如文档说明。类型和 Streamlets 可以在多个项目间轻松复用，而 Tydi 的流和类型层次结构可用于定义接口契约，这有助于在更大系统设计时的协作。该 IR 将 Tydi 规范中确立的规则和属性形式化，并以数据中心的接口视角补充了面向计算的硬件设计工具。为了支持不同的后端和目标，IR 专注于表达接口，并补充了由硬件描述语言和其他 IR 所描述的行为。此外，还提出了一种针对输入与输出进行抽象数据流验证以及替代相互依赖组件的测试语法，该语法允许对行为进行规约。为演示此 IR，我们创建了语法解析器、解析器和查询系统，并将其与面向 VHDL 的后端配对。