Hardware project management - What we can learn from the software development process for hardware design?

Nowadays hardware development process is more and more software oriented. Hardware description languages (HDLs), like VHDL or Verilog, are used to describe the hardware on the register-transfer level (RTL) or on even higher levels of abstraction. Considering ASICs of more than 10 million gates and a HDL to gate ratio of approximately 1: 10 to 1: 100, i.e. one line of HDL code on the RTL corresponds to 10 to 100 gates in the netlist, the HDL description consists of several hundred thousand lines of code. While classical hardware design focuses purely on the development of efficient tools to support the designer, in industrial work processes the development cycle becomes more and more important. In this paper we discuss an approach, where known concepts from software engineering and project management are studied and transferred to the hardware domain. Several aspects are pointed out that should ensure high quality designs and by this the paper presents a way working towards a more robust design process by a tight integration of hardware design and project management. The intention of this work is not to provide an exhaustive discussion, but many points are addressed that with increasing circuit complexity will become more and more important for successful ASIC design.