Change impact analysis for hardware designs from natural language to system level

Design processes are increasingly moving to more abstract description levels; no single formalism can handle the complexities of modern designs. However, keeping designs consistent across different abstraction levels, in particular in the presence of changes, has up to now been an arduous manual task. This paper presents a framework which provides a uniform, interconnected representation of the descriptions across the abstraction levels, starting from natural language requirement specifications over SysML design specifications down to executable SystemC models, allowing to track changes on all levels of abstraction, and ensuring consistency throughout the development process. The framework has been implemented in a tool, CHIMPANC, to show its viability. It assists the developer by highlighting inconsistencies and proof obligations across various descriptions levels in order to simplify the development process.