Skip to content

HIF (Hardware Interchange Format)

Warning

HIF is under active development. The documentation is a work in progress and may contain errors or incomplete information.

HIF Project is a modular framework for modeling, transforming, and verifying heterogeneous HW/SW systems, based on the Hardware Interchange Format (HIF).

Overview

The HIF Project is a tightly integrated set of tools and APIs designed to support modeling, transformation, and verification of heterogeneous HW/SW systems. At its core lies the HIF format, a unified internal language that acts as a bridge between various Hardware Description Languages (HDLs) such as VHDL, Verilog, and SystemC (both RTL and TLM levels).

HIF addresses key pain points in modern hardware design by providing:

  • Bidirectional conversion between HDL and HIF
  • Seamless integration of components modeled in different HDLs
  • Automation for code abstraction, refinement, and fault injection
  • A single environment for transactor generation, mutation analysis, and EFSM extraction

By offering a standardized internal format and robust manipulation APIs, HIF enables faster design reuse, improves simulation performance, and supports safety-critical verification processes that would otherwise require multiple disconnected tools.

Key Features

  • Bidirectional HDL to/from HIF conversion
  • Integration of heterogeneous HDL components
  • Abstraction and refinement of HDL models
  • Fault injection and post-refinement verification
  • Extensible APIs for advanced code manipulation
  • Support for both front-end and back-end transformation tools

Repositories

HIFSuite is organized into three main repositories:

  • hif-core Contains the HIF abstract syntax tree (AST) representation and the core functionality for visiting, analysis, and manipulation of HDL models.

  • hif-frontend Provides front-end tools to convert existing HDL code to HIF. Current tools include:

    • verilog2hif: Verilog to HIF converter
    • vhdl2hif: VHDL to HIF converter

  • hif-backend Implements back-end tools to generate HDL code from HIF. Current tools include:

    • hif2sc: Generates SystemC code from HIF
    • hif2verilog: Generates Verilog code (currently incomplete)

Publications

  • HIFsuite: tools for HDL code conversion and manipulation. Nicola Bombieri, Giuseppe Di Guglielmo, Michele Ferrari, Franco Fummi, Graziano Pravadelli, Francesco Stefanni, and Alessandro Venturelli. EURASIP J. Embedded Syst. 2010, Article 4 (January 2010), 20 pages. https://doi.org/10.1155/2010/436328

License

HIF is released under the BSD 2-Clause License.

Contact

For technical support, collaborations, or further information, contact:

Enrico Fraccaroli (enrico.fraccaroli@univr.it), Department of Engineering for Innovation Medicine University of Verona, Italy