Tydi specification

The Tydi specification, short for Typed dataflow interface specification, aims to provide a standardized way in which complex data types can be transferred from one circuit to another, within the context of FPGAs or ASICs.

How to read this document

The specification is comprised of the following sections.

  • Introduction: defines the motivation and scope of this specification.

  • Notation: defines the mathematical notation used by the remainder of the specification.

  • Physical stream specification. Physical streams are hardware streams with their own valid/ready handshaking interface, transporting elementary data and dimensionality information. Their exact bit-level representation and transfer behavior is defined through five parameters. These parameters are normally derived from logical streams.

  • Logical stream specification. Logical streams are bundles of one or multiple physical streams of some type from the Tydi type system. Types expressed in this type system determine which physical streams with which parameters make up the logical stream. This section also introduces streamlets, the Tydi name for components that have logical streams as inputs and/or outputs.

The two specification sections are written such that the first paragraph of each section defines a new concept, and the subsequent paragraphs constrain it.

Additional information, such as examples, a more intuitive description, or motivation, is written in these kinds of blocks.