AGILE HARDWARE DEVELOPMENT IS NOT A THING! IS IT?

In the world of software development many companies have switched to agile design methods.
As a result, they achieve a faster time to market, fewer bugs, and a higher return on investment compared to traditional approaches.

The Challenges of Applying Agile Methods to Hardware Design

• There is a great variety of agile methods for software, e.g., Test-DrivenDevelopment (TDD), Extreme Program-ming (XP) or  Continuous Integration (CI).
  
  
• What all these methods have in common is their focus on short iterations and fast feedback cycles. mainly achieved by rapid prototyping and unit testing.

Hardware development makes both notoriously hard.
To achieve this, our mission is to provide methods and tools that allow hardware designers to apply these concepts with ease.

Agile with Lubis

‘Agile with Lubis shows our vision of an agile hardware development flow:

• Prototyping: Start by creating a sound and abstract prototype (e.g., with SystemC) that formalizes the functional requirements of the specification. Thanks to our methodology this prototype can be used for functional sign-off of the RTL.

• Design: Automatically create functional (or structural) RTL mock-ups from the prototype created in the previous step to jump-start your design process.

• Verify: Instantly generate a set of formal properties from the prototype. You can use the properties to verify that the RTL design implements the modeled functionality correctly. Similar to unit tests these properties are easy to understand and provide fast feedback. In case of an RTL re-design the properties are re-used for functional verification of the changes 

Sounds great? Interested how the flow works in practice?
This approach aligns with our correct-by-construction methodology, as explained in our article on avoiding re-spins in digital ASIC projects

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