Lucas Klemmer

Hi, I'm Lucas, a computer scientist who found his way into the digital design world. My interests include analyzing waveforms, (formal) hardware verification, computer architecture, open-source EDA tools, and fun stuff with SMT solvers.

You can also find me on Mastodon, GitLab, and GitHub.

I started WAL during my PhD time in Linz, Austria. WAL is a programming language for the analysis of hardware waveforms. It is useful for anything from counting how often a simple condition is true to analyzing busses and caches to a lot more. WAL can be used standalone or embedded in other programming languages. You can also try the short introduction in your browser here.

More information about WAL can be found at wal-lang.org or in our open-access journal article.

(load "waveform.vcd")	  
(whenever (&& (rising clk) ready valid)
  (print INDEX ":" data))

As an example of what is possible with WAL, I built an experimental SVA to WAL compiler. For another example try SonicRv. It is a teaching tool developed at the ICS for their computer architecture class. At the core of SonicRV is a WAL program that reconstructs pipelines from RTL simulation waveforms.

I'm one of the original maintainers of Surfer. Surfer is a modern waveform viewer written in Rust with a focus on extensibility, customization, and a snappy user interface.

Among other things, I have worked on the keyboard-driven interface, the configuration system, RISC-V support, and, of course, WAL integration. Related to Surfer, I currently maintain the WCP protocol (Waveform Control Protocol) and the FTR library used for loading TLM traces into Surfer. You can try the online version of Surfer or find more information about it at surfer-project.org.