Methodology, Algorithms, and Framework for Hardware Design Understanding

理解一个给定的数字系统至少和实施它一样困难。这尤其适用于在大型项目中设计的系统，在这些项目中，没有一个人知道所有细节，具有糟糕或过时文档的遗留组件被重用，团队成员定期更换。然后，设计人员试图使用各种来源来理解设计的内部逻辑--与团队成员的非正式讨论，需求和规范文档等文本信息，以及源代码和测试用例的审查和执行。本项目致力于支持设计人员以整体的方式理解系统设计的源代码：我们将研究方法论、理论和算法，以指导设计人员完成源代码。为了处理潜在的复杂性并为设计提供简明的解释，我们将设计一个交互使用的框架，将轻量级指导与自动得出可理解的结果的算法相结合。实施我们的方法和基本算法的框架将在针对来自开源领域的实际设计的不同任务的经验设计研究中进行评估。该项目具有开创性，因为它将设计理解的方法论形式化，从完整的设计任务到单个步骤全面解决设计理解，并综合评估经验研究的实际影响。

Understanding a given digital system is at least as hard as implementing it. Particularly this holds for systems designed in large projects where no single person knows all details, legacy components with poor or outdated documentation are reused, and team members change regularly. Designers then try to understand the inner logic of the design using various sources -- informal discussions with team members, textual information like documents for requirements and specifications, and review as well as execution of source code and test cases.This project strives to support a designer in understanding the source code of a system design at Register Transfer Level (RTL) in a holistic way:We will study methodology, theory, and algorithms to guide a designer through the source code. To handle the underlying complexity and to provide concise explanations for a design, we will devise a framework for interactive usage that combines light-weight guidance with algorithms that automatically derive result which are understandable. The framework implementing our methodology and underlying algorithms will be evaluated in empirical design studies for different tasks on practical designs taken from the open source domain.The project is ground breaking as it formalizes the methodology for design understanding, holistically addresses design understanding starting from a full design task to individual steps, and comprehensively evaluates the practical impact in empirical studies.