2017 4th Workshop on Design Automation for Understanding Hardware Designs DUHDe 2017

The design process is essentially a creative process which is reliant on the ability of designers to balance the interactions between a complex set of constraints to arrive at successful solutions. In order for designers to manage this task, they must collectively have a complete understanding of the behavior of the system, the mapping between behavior and structure, and the impact of each design feature on constraints such as power, performance, cost, and security. Design tasks require reasoning across multiple levels of abstraction in order to determine the impact of high-level design decisions, or to trace a design characteristic back to the feature which caused it. In a real design, cross-abstraction reasoning is difficult because the relationships between the different abstractions of a design are not captured. Designer time is expended discovering these cross-abstraction relationships in order to perform design, verification, and maintenance tasks. This workshop will present the state-of-the-art in Design Understanding, research in approaches to provide designers with the design information needed in a concise and straightforward way.