Refactoring digital hardware designs with assertion libraries

Author

De Paula, Flavio M. ; Coelho, Claudionor N., Jr. ; Foster, Harry ; Nacif, J.A. ; Tompkins, Joseph ; Fernandes, Antonio O. ; Silva, Diogenes C da, Jr.

Author_Institution

Mindspeed Technol. Inc., USA

fYear

2003

fDate

12-14 Nov. 2003

Firstpage

37

Lastpage

42

Abstract

Refactoring is the concept of restructuring software to increase its readability and maintainability without changing the observable behavior: To the best of our knowledge, the concept of refactoring has only been applied to software development. In this paper, we describe a methodology to extend this concept into the Digital Hardware Design process using the Open Verification Library. We present a case of a network protocol bus functional model in which we want to increase the design readability so that maintenance and bug fixes are less costly.

Keywords

hardware description languages; hardware-software codesign; software libraries; assertion libraries; design reuse; digital hardware designs; hierarchical systems; maintainability; message-passing system; network protocol bus functional model; open verification library; readability; refactoring; software restructuring; Design automation; Documentation; Hardware; Object oriented modeling; Process design; Programming; Protocols; Software libraries; Software maintenance; Time to market;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

High-Level Design Validation and Test Workshop, 2003. Eighth IEEE International

Conference_Location

San Francisco, CA, USA

Print_ISBN

0-7803-8236-6

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/HLDVT.2003.1252472

Filename

1252472