Spade: An Expression-Based HDL With Pipelines

Frans Skarman and Oscar Gustafsson

Abstract

Spade is a new open source hardware description language (HDL) designed to increase developer productivity without sacrificing the low-level control offered by HDLs. It is a standalone language which takes inspiration from modern software languages, and adds useful abstractions for common hardware constructs. It also comes with a convenient set of tooling, such as a helpful compiler, a build system with dependency management, tools for debugging, and editor integration.