Opportunities for Analyzing Hardware Specifications with NLP Techniques

RAGO ALEJANDRO; MARCOS CLAUDIA; DIAZ PACE JORGE ANDRÉS

Dresden, Germany

Workshop; Design Automation for Understanding Hardware Designs - DUHDe'2016; 2016

Hardware design is a mature discipline that heavily relies on complex models to create the blueprints of a system and special notations to describe the expected behavior of its components. However, hardware engineers frequently have to go through multiple specifications written in natural language to identify components, constraints and assertions and translate them to more formal expressions in order to enable automated verifications and consistency checks. For this reason, computer- assisted tools capable of processing and understanding hard- ware documentation can be of great help to assist and guide engineers in difficult and otherwise error-prone activities. In previous works, we have explored several Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques for the analysis of requirements and architecture specifications with promising results. In this article, we report on some interesting applications we developed for inspecting Software Engineering documentation and discuss their potential applications to automated hardware design.