chisel

Chisel is a term with multiple meanings in craft and technology. The most common reference is to a hand tool used for carving, shaping, and paring material. A chisel has a hardened steel blade sharpened to a bevel and fixed in a handle. It is used with a mallet or hammer to remove material from wood, stone, or metal, and for paring joints in carpentry. Woodworking chisels come in various profiles, such as bevel-edged and straight-edged; mortise chisels, gouges, and skew chisels serve different tasks. Proper use involves sharp edges, square blades, and careful control to avoid tear-out, along with regular sharpening and protective storage.

In computing, Chisel refers to a hardware construction language. Chisel is an open-source domain-specific language embedded in Scala that generates digital hardware descriptions. It provides high-level, parameterizable abstractions for building hardware generators that emit synthesizable Verilog. Chisel is used in designing complex integrated circuits and field-programmable gate arrays, notably in open hardware projects and some RISC-V ecosystems. The language emphasizes reusability, abstraction, and testability within a software-like workflow for hardware design.

Disambiguation note: separate uses exist in other crafts and products, but the above cover the primary contemporary senses of Chisel.