Specifying Hardware Communication as Programs

The problem is that hardware testing requires separate driver and monitor programs for each protocol, leading to manual effort and inconsistency risks. The method proposes a DSL that specifies hardware communication protocols as succinct imperative programs, enabling a single specification to both drive and monitor transactions. The abstract does not disclose experimental results, but describes a tool that automatically infers transaction-level traces from waveforms using the DSL specification. This matters because it could eliminate redundant code and reduce bugs in hardware verification for protocols like Wishbone and AXI-Stream.