Design Decisions

A collection of notes to explain some of the design decisions to potential developers and advanced users

‘Pure’ Python

The peakrdl-python RAL was designed to have very limited dependencies on other packages once deployed, this includes the peakrdl-python packages itself, so the library classes are copied into the generated package.

It does need a few packages inorder to build it:

• systemrdl-compiler

• jinja2

Integer Data Types

All the APIs present memory, register and field entries as python integers. This abstracts, the complexity of byte ordering and reversed registers.

Blocks of Data

Changed in version 0.9.0: blocks of data (for example memories were accessed as python array.array previously. This did not support width of larger than 128 bits therefore this was changed to list.