Towards TDD for FPGAs

The TDD (Test-Driven Development) methodology suggests an alternative approach to software production, advising to start the development by writing not code but tests. The approach was proposed by Kent Beck back in 2003, but there are still disputes in software engineering community about the feasibility of developing using this way. In our opinion, the applicability of methodology is hampered by the lack of explicit support from IDEs. In 2018, Ron Wilson from Intel raised the question on the relevance of this methodology to FPGA-based hardware systems development. With the current progress in the field of IoT, the demand is growing for the evolution of signal processing co-processors, devices dedicated to various purposes, neural processors, which is most efficiently implemented using FPGAs. However, the threshold for entry into the development is still high here, including the unusualnesses of the development tools. In this paper, we assume that the support for TDD at the IDE level, especially in the combination of visualized tools, taking into account the specifics of hardware development, will radically increase both the development speed and quality. We pay attention to the drawbacks of the Quartus Prime” IDE from Intel and Altera. Having some background primarily in software development, we offer options for their elimination and demonstrate the approach both on toy examples and a real case study of playing music from an SD card.