Voss II

Voss II is a software suite for describing and reasoning about circuits. Circuits, and properties about them, are described in a functional language called fl.

Fl is a statically typed language with call-by-need semantics (also known as lazy evaluation) and binary decision diagrams built right into the language itself.

Voss II has been tested and found to work on Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Red Hat and OpenSUSE. If you're using it on another distribution, we'd love to hear from you!

Introduction to VossII

There is a "Getting Started with VossII and fl" tutorial in the doc/fl_tutorial directory (you can do firefox doc/fl_tutorial/fl_tutorial.html or your choice of browser to see it)

There is also a more extensive User's Guide

Installation

For some major parts of VossII functionality (e.g., importing Verilog files and interface with synthesis tools), VossII relies on tools from the OSS CAD Suite (https://github.com/YosysHQ/oss-cad-suite-build) and thus a prerequisite to unlock all features of VossII is to have a version of oss-cad-suite installed on your machine. You can get a ready to use version of oss-cad-suite at (https://github.com/YosysHQ/oss-cad-suite-build/releases). Follow the instructions in (https://github.com/YosysHQ/oss-cad-suite-build) to get a version.

To get VossII, the simplest is to download our pre-built binaries and unpack them to your directory of choice, then put /bin in your search path and you will be able to run the fl interpreter by simply invokng fl. Note that you need the OSS version of yosys in your search path for the Verilog reader to work.

Voss II depends on Tcl/Tk for its graphical bits. If the fl interpreter dies with an angry message about not being able to find wish, you need to install it:

• On Ubuntu/other Debian-based

  sudo apt install tk

• On Fedora/Red Hat

  sudo yum install tk

• On SUSE

  sudo zypper install tk

Building (on Ubuntu/Debian)

If you want to build your own libraries you will first need to install some build dependencies:

sudo apt-get install gcc g++ flex bison gawk \
                     libz-dev tcl-dev tk-dev libc6-dev clang \
                     libedit-dev
                     

Then, from the root of the VossII repository (assuming you've already cloned it), run:

make -C src install_all

This will build Voss II and install it into the repository root directory. If you want to build a distributable binary package, you should install run:

make -C src clean_package

This will create a file voss.tar.bz2 in the repository root directory.

Finally, if you just want to build a Voss II package in a pristine environment, without having to sully your system with a bunch of dependencies, you can use Docker to build voss.tar.bz2 instead:

make -C src docker_package

If you're not a member of the docker group on your system, you will need to run the above command as root.

To verify the installation, run:

fl