Zoomie: A Software-like Debugging Tool for FPGAs

FPGA prototyping has long been an indispensable technique in pre-silicon verification as well as enabling early-stage software development. FPGAs themselves have also gained popularity as hardware accelerators deployed in datacenters. However, FPGA development brings a plethora of problems. These issues constitute a high barrier towards mass adoption of agile development surrounding FPGA-based projects.

To address these problems, we have built Zoomie for fast incremental compilation, reusing verification infrastructure, and a software-inspired approach towards open-source emulation. We show that Zoomie achieves 18× speedup over the vendor toolchain in incremental compilation time for million-gate designs. At the same time, Zoomie also provides a software-like debugging experience with breakpoints, stepping the design, and forcing values in a running design.