Refactoring digital hardware designs with assertion libraries

Abstract

Refactoring is the concept of restructuring software to increase its readability and maintainability without changing the observable behavior: To the best of our knowledge, the concept of refactoring has only been applied to software development. In this paper, we describe a methodology to extend this concept into the Digital Hardware Design process using the Open Verification Library. We present a case of a network protocol bus functional model in which we want to increase the design readability so that maintenance and bug fixes are less costly.