A consistency verification method for design models in design environments

This paper considers the set of tools built in the design environment for digital hardware, and proposes a method to verify the consistency between the set of tools and the data model. In the design support environment which integrates the set of tools with different data models in general, the interchangeability of the design data is maintained through the common data format. In practice, however, semantic gaps are often produced between the data models. In the proposed method, the data models of the tools and the data models to be presented by the whole environment to the hardware designer are formally defined using the semantic network. The difference between the data models is extracted by operations between the semantic networks. The method was applied to the design support environment based mostly on the netlist information, and the inconsistencies at the semantic level were detected, which has been difficult at the syntax level.