Behavior Driven Development for circuit design and verification

The design of hardware systems is a challenging and erroneous task where about 70% of the effort in designing these systems is spent on verification. In general, testing and verification are usually tasks that are being applied as a post-process to the implementation. In this paper, we propose a new design flow based on Behavior Driven Development (BDD), an agile technique for the development of software in which acceptance tests written in natural language play a central role and are the starting point in the design flow. We advance the flow such that the specifics that arise when modeling hardware are taken into account. Furthermore, we present a technique that allows for the automatic generalization of test cases to properties that are suitable for formal verification. This allows the designer to apply formal verification techniques based on test cases without specifying properties. We implemented our approach and evaluated the flow for an illustrative example that successfully demonstrates the advantages of the proposed flow.

I. Introduction

With the advent of computers the problems of bugs in hardware and software arose. Since then the challenge of “getting the bugs out” continues to grow due to the increasing complexity of the systems. Hence, enormous effort has been put into the development of methodologies reducing the bug rates or even ensuring correctness.