Associate Professor of Computer Science Ian G. Harris, along with Mathias Soeken of the University of Bremen and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, is organizing an innovative upcoming design automation workshop, “Design Automation for Understanding Hardware Designs” (DUHDe), on March 18 in Dresden, Germany. DUHDe will will take place on the final day of the Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference (DATE 2016), an annual trade show and conference focused on electronic design automation.
The DUHDe workshop seeks to aid circuit design practitioners and design automation researchers in difficulties that arise when entering a large team as a new member, when extending a legacy design or when documenting a new design. According to the workshop organizers, unlike the software engineering community, where major concepts are well-established and tackled by readily-developed tools, hardware design requires “deep insight into concurrently operating units, optimizations to reduce the required area, and specially tailored functional units for a particular use.”
The DUHDe workshop will cover a variety of topics, including:
- Design descriptions from the FSL (Formal Specification Level) to ESL (Electronic System Level) down to RTL (Register Transfer Level)
- Extraction of high-level properties
- Feature Localization: Localization of code implementing specialized functionality
- Synthesis and Verification from Natural Language
- Hardware design evolution: feature integration, feature interactions
- Reverse Engineering
- Innovative GUIs for design
- Analysis of interaction between hardware and software
- Formal methods for design understanding
- Scalable approaches to design understanding
For more information on DUHDe 2016, including this year’s program and links to past DUHDe workshops, visit the DUHDe website.