Many people have helped out in the design of Chisel, and we thank them for their patience, bravery, and belief in a better way. Many Berkeley EECS students in the Isis group gave weekly feedback as the design evolved including but not limited to Yunsup Lee, Andrew Waterman, Scott Beamer, Chris Celio, etc. Yunsup Lee gave us feedback in response to the first RISC-V implementation, called TrainWreck, translated from Verilog to Chisel. Andrew Waterman and Yunsup Lee helped us get our Verilog backend up and running and Chisel TrainWreck running on an FPGA. Brian Richards was the first actual Chisel user, first translating (with Huy Vo) John Hauser's FPU Verilog code to Chisel, and later implementing generic memory blocks. Brian gave many invaluable comments on the design and brought a vast experience in hardware design and design tools. Chris Batten shared his fast multiword C++ template library that inspired our fast emulation library. Huy Vo became our undergraduate research assistant and was the first to actually assist in the Chisel implementation. We appreciate all the EECS students who participated in the Chisel bootcamp and proposed and worked on hardware design projects all of which pushed the Chisel envelope. We appreciate the work that James Martin and Alex Williams did in writing and translating network and memory controllers and non-blocking caches. Finally, Chisel's functional programming and bit-width inference ideas were inspired by earlier work on a hardware description language called Gel designed in collaboration with Dany Qumsiyeh and Mark Tobenkin.
Bachrach, J., Vo, H., Richards, B., Lee, Y., Waterman, A., Avizienis, Wawrzynek, J., Asanovic, K.
Chisel: Constructing Hardware in a Scala Embedded Language.
in DAC '12.
Bachrach, J., Qumsiyeh, D., Tobenkin, M.
Hardware Scripting in Gel.
in Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines, 2008. FCCM '08. 16th.