Enhancing Test-Driven Development for Reconfigurable Hardware through High-Level Synthesis and Early-Stage Validation

High-level synthesis tools help engineers deal with the challenges of building complex systems that use reconfigurable technologies. Such serves as a precursor to well-established methods in the software industry, such as Test-Driven Development, in the development process of hardware components of an embedded system. However, the assistance offered by the high-level synthesis validation tools could be strengthened and targeted at the early stages of project development. This paper describes a hardware testing framework as a means to quickly evaluate the capabilities of embedded components using a unit testing paradigm, leading to Test-Driven Development implementation on reconfigurable hardware.