What is Yosys

Yosys began as a BSc thesis project by Claire Wolf intended to support synthesis for a CGRA (coarse-grained reconfigurable architecture). It then expanded into more general infrastructure for research on synthesis.

Modern Yosys has full support for the synthesizable subset of Verilog-2005 and has been described as “the GCC of hardware synthesis.” Freely available and open source, Yosys finds use across hobbyist and commercial applications as well as academic.

Note

Yosys is released under the ISC License:

A permissive license lets people do anything with your code with proper attribution and without warranty. The ISC license is functionally equivalent to the BSD 2-Clause and MIT licenses, removing some language that is no longer necessary.

Together with the place and route tool nextpnr, Yosys can be used to program some FPGAs with a fully end-to-end open source flow (Lattice iCE40 and ECP5). It also does the synthesis portion for the OpenLane flow, targeting the SkyWater 130nm open source PDK for fully open source ASIC design. Yosys can also do formal verification with backends for solver formats like SMT2.

Yosys, and the accompanying Open Source EDA ecosystem, is currently maintained by Yosys Headquarters, with many of the core developers employed by YosysHQ GmbH. A commercial extension, Tabby CAD Suite, includes the Verific frontend for industry-grade SystemVerilog and VHDL support, formal verification with SVA, and formal apps.

What you can do with Yosys

• Read and process (most of) modern Verilog-2005 code

• Perform all kinds of operations on netlist (RTL, Logic, Gate)

• Perform logic optimizations and gate mapping with ABC

Typical applications for Yosys

• Synthesis of final production designs

• Pre-production synthesis (trial runs before investing in other tools)

• Conversion of full-featured Verilog to simple Verilog

• Conversion of Verilog to other formats (BLIF, BTOR, etc)

• Demonstrating synthesis algorithms (e.g. for educational purposes)

• Framework for experimenting with new algorithms

• Framework for building custom flows (Not limited to synthesis but also formal verification, reverse engineering, …)

Things you can’t do

• Process high-level languages such as C/C++/SystemC

• Create physical layouts (place&route)

  • Check out nextpnr for that

The Yosys family

As mentioned above, YosysHQ maintains not just Yosys but an entire family of tools built around it. In no particular order:

SBY for formal verification

Yosys provides input parsing and conversion to the formats used by the solver engines. Yosys also provides a unified witness framework for providing cover traces and counter examples for engines which don’t natively support this. SBY source | SBY docs

EQY for equivalence checking

In addition to input parsing and preparation, Yosys provides the plugin support enabling EQY to operate on designs directly. EQY source | EQY docs

MCY for mutation coverage

Yosys is used to read the source design, generate a list of possible mutations to maximise design coverage, and then perform selected mutations. MCY source | MCY docs

SCY for deep formal traces

Since SCY generates and runs SBY, Yosys provides the same utility for SCY as it does for SBY. Yosys additionally provides the trace concatenation needed for outputting the deep traces. SCY source

The original thesis abstract

The first version of the Yosys documentation was published as a bachelor thesis at the Vienna University of Technology [Wol13].

Abstract:

Most of today’s digital design is done in HDL code (mostly Verilog or VHDL) and with the help of HDL synthesis tools.

In special cases such as synthesis for coarse-grain cell libraries or when testing new synthesis algorithms it might be necessary to write a custom HDL synthesis tool or add new features to an existing one. In these cases the availability of a Free and Open Source (FOSS) synthesis tool that can be used as basis for custom tools would be helpful.

In the absence of such a tool, the Yosys Open SYnthesis Suite (Yosys) was developed. This document covers the design and implementation of this tool. At the moment the main focus of Yosys lies on the high-level aspects of digital synthesis. The pre-existing FOSS logic-synthesis tool ABC is used by Yosys to perform advanced gate-level optimizations.

An evaluation of Yosys based on real-world designs is included. It is shown that Yosys can be used as-is to synthesize such designs. The results produced by Yosys in this tests where successfully verified using formal verification and are comparable in quality to the results produced by a commercial synthesis tool.

Yosys is a Verilog HDL synthesis tool. This means that it takes a behavioural design description as input and generates an RTL, logical gate or physical gate level description of the design as output. Yosys’ main strengths are behavioural and RTL synthesis. A wide range of commands (synthesis passes) exist within Yosys that can be used to perform a wide range of synthesis tasks within the domain of behavioural, rtl and logic synthesis. Yosys is designed to be extensible and therefore is a good basis for implementing custom synthesis tools for specialised tasks.

Fig. 1 Where Yosys exists in the layers of abstraction

Benefits of open source HDL synthesis

• Cost (also applies to free as in free beer solutions):

  Today the cost for a mask set in 180nm technology is far less than the cost for the design tools needed to design the mask layouts. Open Source ASIC flows are an important enabler for ASIC-level Open Source Hardware.

• Availability and Reproducibility:

  If you are a researcher who is publishing, you want to use tools that everyone else can also use. Even if most universities have access to all major commercial tools, you usually do not have easy access to the version that was used in a research project a couple of years ago. With Open Source tools you can even release the source code of the tool you have used alongside your data.

• Framework:

  Yosys is not only a tool. It is a framework that can be used as basis for other developments, so researchers and hackers alike do not need to re-invent the basic functionality. Extensibility was one of Yosys’ design goals.

• All-in-one:

  Because of the framework characteristics of Yosys, an increasing number of features become available in one tool. Yosys not only can be used for circuit synthesis but also for formal equivalence checking, SAT solving, and for circuit analysis, to name just a few other application domains. With proprietary software one needs to learn a new tool for each of these applications.

• Educational Tool:

  Proprietary synthesis tools are at times very secretive about their inner workings. They often are black boxes. Yosys is very open about its internals and it is easy to observe the different steps of synthesis.

History of Yosys

A Hardware Description Language (HDL) is a computer language used to describe circuits. A HDL synthesis tool is a computer program that takes a formal description of a circuit written in an HDL as input and generates a netlist that implements the given circuit as output.

Currently the most widely used and supported HDLs for digital circuits are Verilog [A+02, A+06] and VHDL [A+04, A+09]. Both HDLs are used for test and verification purposes as well as logic synthesis, resulting in a set of synthesizable and a set of non-synthesizable language features. In this document we only look at the synthesizable subset of the language features.

In recent work on heterogeneous coarse-grain reconfigurable logic [WGS+12] the need for a custom application-specific HDL synthesis tool emerged. It was soon realised that a synthesis tool that understood Verilog or VHDL would be preferred over a synthesis tool for a custom HDL. Given an existing Verilog or VHDL front end, the work for writing the necessary additional features and integrating them in an existing tool can be estimated to be about the same as writing a new tool with support for a minimalistic custom HDL.

The proposed custom HDL synthesis tool should be licensed under a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) licence. So an existing FOSS Verilog or VHDL synthesis tool would have been needed as basis to build upon. The main advantages of choosing Verilog or VHDL is the ability to synthesize existing HDL code and to mitigate the requirement for circuit-designers to learn a new language. In order to take full advantage of any existing FOSS Verilog or VHDL tool, such a tool would have to provide a feature-complete implementation of the synthesizable HDL subset.

Basic RTL synthesis is a well understood field [HS96]. Lexing, parsing and processing of computer languages [ASU86] is a thoroughly researched field. All the information required to write such tools has been openly available for a long time, and it is therefore likely that a FOSS HDL synthesis tool with a feature-complete Verilog or VHDL front end must exist which can be used as a basis for a custom RTL synthesis tool.

Due to the author’s preference for Verilog over VHDL it was decided early on to go for Verilog instead of VHDL [1]. So the existing FOSS Verilog synthesis tools were evaluated. The results of this evaluation are utterly devastating. Therefore a completely new Verilog synthesis tool was implemented and is recommended as basis for custom synthesis tools. This is the tool that is discussed in this document.

[1]

A quick investigation into FOSS VHDL tools yielded similar grim results for FOSS VHDL synthesis tools.