Electronics and Information Systems

On November 25th, Prof. Dirk Stroobandt welcomes Philippe Faes as guest speaker in his Hardware-Software codesign course. Philippe is the founding CEO of Sigasi, a high-tech startup that brings the intelligent code refactoring to the world of digital design. The lecture will outline the productivity lag of hardware designers compared to software designers, and will demonstrate that most of this gap can be bridged with a new generation of tool support, more specifically hardware refactoring.

Hardware refactoring is a technology that helps digital hardware designers create better hardware in a shorter time.
Designing, improving and reusing digital circuits traditionally involves typing a lot of code. This is a time-consuming and error-prone activity that keeps engineers from thinking about what is really important: the hardware itself. Hardware refactoring tools automate modifications to hardware code, while the designer remains in full control. This way, the designer can focus on the creative part, while the refactoring tool does the dirty work.

Hardware refactoring is a natural extension of software code refactoring, a well established technology in software engineering to improve code quality. The trend of applying refactoring techniques to hardware designs began with research from the University of Darmstadt and Synopsys, and has now resulted in Sigasi’s patent pending hardware refactoring tool.

For more information on Philippe and his company, please refer to the website: http://www.sigasi.com/