Chiselsim

ChiselSim is more than a simulation trick—it’s a philosophy: simulate where you design, with the tools you already know. By bringing simulation into the Chisel/Scala ecosystem, it eliminates context switching, accelerates debug cycles, and opens hardware design to modern software practices. For anyone serious about productive, testable, and maintainable digital design, ChiselSim is not just helpful—it’s essential.

: Ensures synchronization between HDL code, software headers, and documentation to minimize manual coding errors. chiselsim

Hardware simulation remains a critical bottleneck in the design and verification of modern digital systems. Traditional approaches rely on heavyweight, proprietary simulators or slow software models. This paper introduces ChiselSim , a novel simulation framework built on the Chisel hardware construction language. ChiselSim leverages the inherent modularity and generative programming capabilities of Chisel to produce a high-performance, highly customizable simulator. By generating optimized C++ code that compiles into a stand-alone executable, ChiselSim bypasses the overhead of interpreted hardware description languages (HDLs) and rigid commercial toolchains. We demonstrate that ChiselSim achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art cycle-accurate simulators while offering superior flexibility for design-space exploration and verification integration. ChiselSim is more than a simulation trick—it’s a