provide an Chisel Native API for SystemVerilog bind

[Jiuyang Liu]

Type of issue: Feature Request

For a FixedIOModule, the ioGenerator is its header.

Think about this scenario, Different teams can only access the header for different purpose, e.g. RTL designer, DV engineer seeing Probe and ProbeRW, Performance Model engineer writing necessary printf to specific signals(Probe it).

There will be three different end users to the specified ioGenerator, and three layers of IO in three colors. three teams are developing three Modules but bind at last.

Currently bind can be automatically extracted in CIRCT.

But we may need a way to expose this functionality in Chisel.

[Jack Koenig]

This is actually what Layers are: https://www.chisel-lang.org/docs/explanations/layers

[Jiuyang Liu]

Yes. Layer is doing good in firrtl spec. But at chisel level, I’m thinking is there some design pattern for it? e.g. aop for a same IO, and corresponding aspect will have corresponding layer. This is possible. But does it support D/I? I’m not sure.