Flexible Software to Hardware Migration Methodology for FPGA Design and Verification

Abstract

Modern FPGA developments require flexible and Agile methodologies to support complex designs meeting the current highly demanding time-to-market metrics. Traditional hardware development processes based on waterfall flows are not adequate to get the most of the new reconfigurable FPGA technologies. Co-design and co-verification techniques allow handling both software and hardware development in a highly integrated process. However, such integration requires a deep knowledge of both hardware and software development. DUTILS is a Python/Cocotb-based environment for concurrent development suitable for modern software development technologies. This paper proposes software to hardware migration methodology for the DUTILS environment that allows a seamless integration between software and hardware design and the verification process flow of the whole system.