DAU 2014 - Workshop on Design Automation for Understanding Hardware Designs

Understanding a hardware design is tough. When entering a large team as a new member, when extending a legacy design, or when documenting a new design, a lack in understanding the details of a design is a major obstacle for productivity. In software engineering topics like software maintenance, software understanding, reverse engineering are well established in the research community and partially tackled by tools. In the hardware area the re-use of IP-blocks, the growing size of designs and design teams leads to similar problems. Understanding of hardware requires deep insight into concurrently operating units, optimizations to reduce the required area, and specially tailored functional units for a particular use. The workshop is of interest to practitioners working in circuit design and to researchers interested in design automation. The aim of the 1st Workshop on Design Automation for Understanding Hardware Designs (DUHDe) is to establish a community for these topics in electronic design automation. The workshop is not limited to the following topics in design understanding but includes:
Design descriptions from the ESL down to RTL
Extraction of high-level properties
Localization of code implementing specialized functionality
Hardware design evolution: feature integration, feature interactions
Innovative GUIs for design
Managing documentation of hardware designs
Analysis of interaction between hardware and software
Formal methods for design understanding
Scalable approaches to design understanding