README.md

vhdMMIO

vhdMMIO is a fully vendor-agnostic tool to build AXI4-lite MMIO infrastructure with, based on easy-to-write YAML specification files. For instance:

metadata:
  name: basic

fields:

  - address: 0
    name: ctrl
    behavior: control

  - address: 4
    name: stat
    behavior: status

  - address: 0x1---
    name: slv_a
    behavior: axi

gives you a VHDL file with a 32-bit output for the control register at address 0x0000, a 32-bit input for the status register at address 0x0004, and a slave AXI4-lite bus mapped to address 0x1000 through 0x1FFF. vhdMMIO also generates documentation, ensuring that it stays up-to-date. We aim to generate at least C header files in the future as well, but this is currently not implemented.

Installation

While the project is very much in alpha, it is already usable and fairly stable. Installation can be done through pip:

pip3 install vhdmmio

This installs the vhdmmio command-line tool and the Python 3 library it wraps. Basic usage of the command-line tool is just

vhdmmio -H -P -V

which searches the current working directory for *.mmio.yaml files, and generates HTML documentation into ./vhdmmio-doc (-H), generates the common vhdMMIO package file - vhdmmio_pkg.gen.vhd - in the current working directory (-P), and generates the custom VHDL package and entity for each YAML file in the same directory as the YAML file (-V).

Documentation

Most of vhdMMIO's documentation is concerned with the structure of the YAML configuration files. You can find this here. You can also find example register file descriptions here.