Corsair

Corsair is a tool that makes it easy to create and maintain control and status register (CSR) map for any HDL project. It allows you to describe your register map in a single file and then generate HDL code, headers, documentation and other things. This effectively eliminates any mismatches between hardware, software and documentation of your IP-core.

Features

• Various human-readable input formats: JSON, YAML or plain text table
• HDL code generation: Verilog or VHDL module with register map, Verilog header or SystemVerilog package with parameters and definitions
• Multi-protocol support: APB, AXI-Lite, Avalon-MM
• Documentation generation: Markdown, AsciiDoc
• Generation of software-related files: C header, Python module
• Extensibility: support of external file generators
• API: creation of custom workflow with corsair API

Corsair documentation is on the ReadTheDocs.io.

Install

Depending on your system, Python 3 executable might be python or python3. If there any permissions issues, add --user key to the installation scripts.

To install the latest stable release:

python3 -m pip install -U corsair

Quick start

The best way to start is to create templates. You can create one for a register map in a format you like (choose onе from json, yaml, txt) :

corsair -t yaml

This generates two files: one for register map in the format specified regs.yaml, and other for configuration - csrconfig.

Register map consists of a collection of memory mapped registers (also referred as CSRs), and registers are made up of bit fields. For example, register map of one register looks like this in YAML:

regmap:
-   name: CTRL
    description: Control register
    address: 8
    bitfields:
    -   name: BAUD
        description: Baudrate value
        reset: 0
        width: 2
        lsb: 0
        access: rw
        hardware: o
        enums:
        -   name: B9600
            description: 9600 baud
            value: 0
        -   name: B38400
            description: 38400 baud
            value: 1
        -   name: B115200
            description: 115200 baud
            value: 2

To know more about registers, bit fields and their attributes please check the Register map documentation page.

Corsair is configuration-file-oriented tool. By default, it uses INI configuration file csrconfig. It specifies all the things needed for generation - input register map file, global parameters and output files (also called targets). It may looks like this:

[globcfg]
data_width = 32
address_width = 16
register_reset = sync_pos

[v_module]
path = regs.v
interface = axil
generator = Verilog

[c_header]
path = regs.h
generator = CHeader

Check the Configuration file page to get more details about csrconfig and the Introduction page to get general information about workflow.

csrconfig also acts like a build script for corsair, so just run in the directory with csrconfig file:

corsair

And then all the magic happens.

There are some additional options for overriding working directory, register map or configuration file - to get help simply run

corsair -h

If you looking for some more examples please check examples folder.

Development

Please follow the Developer's Guide.

License

Corsair is licensed under MIT License.