Weaving Schematics and Code: Interactive Visual Editing for Hardware Description Languages

In many engineering disciplines such as circuit board, chip, and mechanical design, a hardware description language (HDL) approach provides important benefits over direct manipulation interfaces by supporting concepts like abstraction and generator meta-programming. While several such HDLs have emerged recently and promised power and flexibility, they also present challenges – especially to designers familiar with current graphical workflows. In this work, we investigate an IDE approach to provide a graphical editor for a board-level circuit design HDL. Unlike GUI builders which convert an entire diagram to code, we instead propose generating equivalent HDL from individual graphical edit actions. By keeping code as the primary design input, we preserve the full power of the underlying HDL, while remaining useful even to advanced users. We discuss our concept, design considerations such as performance, system implementation, and report on the results of an exploratory remote user study with four experienced hardware designers.