Title
Weaving Schematics and Code: Interactive Visual Editing for Hardware Description Languages
Abstract
ABSTRACTIn many engineering disciplines such as circuit board, chip, and mechanical design, a hardware description language (HDL) approach provides important benefits over direct manipulation interfaces by supporting concepts like abstraction and generator meta-programming. While several such HDLs have emerged recently and promised power and flexibility, they also present challenges – especially to designers familiar with current graphical workflows. In this work, we investigate an IDE approach to provide a graphical editor for a board-level circuit design HDL. Unlike GUI builders which convert an entire diagram to code, we instead propose generating equivalent HDL from individual graphical edit actions. By keeping code as the primary design input, we preserve the full power of the underlying HDL, while remaining useful even to advanced users. We discuss our concept, design considerations such as performance, system implementation, and report on the results of an exploratory remote user study with four experienced hardware designers.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1145/3472749.3474804
UIST
DocType
Citations 
PageRank 
Conference
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Richard Lin162.55
Rohit Ramesh221.73
Nikhil Jain311.04
Josephine Koe400.34
Ryan Nuqui500.34
P. Dutta63612267.92
Bjoern Hartmann700.34