More SystemVerilog Streaming Examples

In my previous post I promised I would write about more interesting cases of streaming using a slice_size and arrays of ints and bytes.  Well, I just posted another set of streaming examples to edaplayground.  I'm going to mostly let you look at that code and learn by example, but I will take some time in this post to explain what I think is the trickiest of the conversions.  When you go to edaplayground, choose the Modelsim simulator to run these.  Riviera-PRO is currently the only other SystemVerilog simulator choice on edaplayground, and it messes up on the tricky ones (more on that in a bit).

These examples demonstrate using the streaming operator to do these conversions:

• unpacked array of bytes to int
• queue of ints to queue of bytes
• queue of bytes to queue of ints
• int to queue of bytes
• class to queue of bytes

Of all those examples, the queue of ints to queue of bytes and the queue of bytes to queue of ints are the tricky ones that I want to spend more time explaining.  They are both tricky for the same reason.  If you are like me, your first thought on how to convert a queue of ints to a queue of bytes is to just do this:

byte_queue_dest = {<< byte{int_queue_source}};

Before I explain why that might not be what you want, be sure you remember what "right" and "left" mean from my previous post.  The problem with the straightforward streaming concatenation above is it will start on the right of the int queue (int_queue_source[max_index], because it's unpacked), grab the right-most byte of that int (int_queue_source[max_index][7:0], because the int itself is packed), and put that byte on the left of byte_queue_dest (byte_queue_dest[0], because it is unpacked).  It will then grab the next byte from the right of the int_queue (int_queue_source[max_index][15:8]) and put it in the next position of byte_queue_dest (byte_queue_dest[1]), and so on.  The result is that you end up with the ints from the int queue reversed in the byte queue.  If that doesn't make sense, change the code in the example to the above streaming concatenation and just try it.

To preserve the byte ordering, you do this double streaming concatenation:

byte_queue_dest = {<< byte{ {<< int{int_queue_source}} }};

Let's step through this using the literal representation of the arrays so that rights and lefts will be obvious.  You start with an (unpacked, of course) queue of ints:

int_queue_source = {'h44332211, 'h88776655};

And just to be clear, that means int_queu_source[0][7:0] is 'h11 and we want that byte to end up as byte_queue_dest[0].  The inner stream takes 32-bits at a time from the right and puts them on the left of a temporary packed array of bits.  That ends up looking like this:

temp_bits = 'h8877665544332211;

Now the outer stream takes 8 bits at a time from the right of that and puts them on the left of a queue.  That gives you this in the end:

byte_queue_dest = {'h11, 'h22, 'h33, 'h44, 'h55, 'h66, 'h77, 'h88};

Which, if you wanted to preserve the logical byte ordering, is correct.  Going from bytes to ints, it turns out, is pretty much the same: reverse the queue of bytes and then stream an int at a time.

So what happens with Riviera-PRO?  If you try it in edaplayground you see that the resulting queue of bytes in the int-to-byte conversion ends up with a whole bunch of extra random bytes on the right (highest indexes of the queue).  8 extra, to be exact.  Same for the int queue result in the byte-to-int conversion.  I think Riviera-PROP must be streaming past the end of the temporary packed array (that I called temp_bits above) of pulling in bytes from off in the weeds.  Pretty crazy.  That's all done behind the scenes so I don't really know, but that's sure what it looks like.  Hopefully they can fix that soon.

Well, I hope I've helped clear up how to use the streaming operators for someone.  If I haven't, I have at least helped myself understand them better.  Ask any questions you have in the comments.