Opportunities and Challenges for Circuit Board Level Hardware Description Languages

TL;DR

This paper examines the potential and difficulties of using circuit board level hardware description languages to improve automation and abstraction in electronics design, highlighting recent prototypes and open research questions.

Contribution

It provides an analysis of recent HDL prototypes for circuit boards and discusses open challenges in modeling and usability for hardware engineers.

Findings

Recent prototypes demonstrate potential for higher abstraction in hardware design.

Open questions remain in modeling and user interface design for circuit board HDLs.

The paper identifies key research directions for advancing hardware description languages.

Abstract

Board-level hardware description languages (HDLs) are one approach to increasing automation and raising the level of abstraction for designing electronics. These systems borrow programming languages concepts like generators and type systems, but also must be designed with human factors in mind to serve existing hardware engineers. In this work, we look at one recent prototype system, and discuss open questions spanning from fundamental models through usable interfaces.