Despite the high configurability of IPs and hardware generators, code modifications are still required to introduce aspect-oriented instrumentation to satisfy emerging aspectual design requirements such as on-chip debug and functional safety. These code modifications escalate development, verification efforts, and deteriorate code reuse. This paper proposes a highly efficient transformative hardware design methodology that leverages graph-grammar-based model transformations. Following the proposed methodology, main design functionalities and aspectual instrumentation are separately developed, automatically integrated, and verified. To demonstrate the applicability, industrial SoCs were transformed to support on-chip debug. Compared to the manual RTL coding, the proposed transformative methodology needed less than 32x Lines of Code (LoC) to develop and integrate the aspectual instrumentation. In particular, our approach enables high code reusability, as the implementation of the transformation script is a one-time effort, and can be applied to all evaluated SoCs. This high LoC gain and code reuse promote the overall productivity of digital design.

Despite the high configurability of IPs and hardware generators, code modifications are still required to introduce aspect-oriented instrumentation to satisfy emerging design requirements such as on-chip debug and functional safety. These code modifications lead to escalated development, verification efforts and deteriorate the code reuse. This paper proposes a highly efficient aspect-oriented design automation approach that leverages graph-grammar-based model transformations. With the proposed approach, main design functionalities and aspect-oriented instrumentation are separately developed, automatically integrated and verified. To demonstrate the applicability, industrial SoCs were transformed to support on-chip debug. Experimental results confirm the efficiency of the approach. Further, reduced code is needed with the proposed automation approach, which also replaces the error-prone manual RTL coding. Finally, the transformation scripts are applicable to different SoCs, which promotes the overall code reuse.