WAL: A Novel Waveform Analysis Language for Advanced Design Understanding and Debugging

Starting points for design understanding and debugging are generated waveforms. However, waveform viewing is still a highly manual and tedious process, and unfortunately, there has been no progress for automating the analysis of waveforms. Therefore, we introduce the Waveform Analysis Language (WAL) in this paper. We have realized WAL as a Domain Specific Language (DSL). This design choice has many advantages ranging from a natural expressiveness of a waveform analysis problem to providing an Intermediate Representation (IR) well-suited as a compilation target from other languages. We evaluate WAL in two major case studies. This includes (i) a WAL-based communication analyzer reporting for example throughput or latency of AXI communication and (ii) the tracing of the instruction flow through the pipeline of a RISC-V processor as well as the extraction of software basic blocks via WAWK, which is based on the WAL-IR to make complex waveform analysis as easy as searching in text files.