00mjk / act

ACT hardware description language and core tools.

The ACT language and core tools

This is the implementation of the ACT hardware description language, and some of the core tools. (ACT = asynchronous circuit/compiler tools)

System requirements:

• The system must have libedit installed. For the yum package manager, the package is called libedit-devel; for apt-get, it is libeditline-dev. Some systems have both packages. In that case please use libedit, not libeditline.
• The system should have zlib installed
• The system should have the macro pre-processing package m4 installed

Build instructions:

• Create a directory where you'd like the tools to be installed. Example common locations on Unix-like machines include /usr/local/cad, /opt/cad, /opt/async. You can also install them in any other directory (e.g. $HOME/async)
• Set the environment variable ACT_HOME to point to the install directory.
• Set the environment variable VLSI_TOOLS_SRC to the root of the source tree (i.e. the /path/to/act).
• From the $VLSI_TOOLS_SRC directory, run ./configure $ACT_HOME
• Run ./build

If there is an issue building the software and you want to do a clean build, use "make realclean"

Once you've built the tools, run "make install" to install the files, and "make runtest" to run through a set of test cases.

Standard library

The ACT standard library (analogous to the C++ standard template library) is under development. We recommend installing it as part of your ACT install, as some of the other tools might assume some standard ACT files exist.

More information:

More detailed documentation is available here: http://avlsi.csl.yale.edu/act/

A first ACT tutorial: http://avlsi.csl.yale.edu/act/doku.php?id=tutorial:basicprs

Some more installation instructions are available here: http://avlsi.csl.yale.edu/act/doku.php?id=install