Basic concepts for an HDL reverse engineering tool-set

Designer's productivity has become the key-factor of the development of electronic systems. An increasing application of design data reuse is widely recognized as a promising technique to master future design complexities. Since the intellectual property of a design is more and more kept in software-like hardware description languages (HDL), successful reuse depends on the availability of suitable HDL reverse engineering tools. This paper introduces new concepts for an integrated HDL reverse engineering tool-set and presents an implemented evaluation prototype for VHDL designs. Starting from an arbitrary collection of HDL source code files, several graphical and textual views on the design description are automatically generated. The tool-set provides novel hypertext techniques, expressive graphical code representations, a user-defined level of abstraction, and interactive configuration mechanisms in order to facilitate the analysis, adoption and upgrade of existing HDL designs.