Hardware Refactoring
While the term refactoring originally referred exclusively to refactoring of software code, in recent years code written in hardware description languages (HDLs) has also been refactored. The term hardware refactoring is used as a shorthand term for refactoring of code in hardware description languages. Since HDLs are not considered to be programming languages by most hardware engineers, hardware refactoring is to be considered a separate field from traditional code refactoring.
Automated refactoring of analog hardware descriptions (in VHDL-AMS) has been proposed by Zeng and Huss. In their approach, refactoring preserves the simulated behavior of a hardware design. The non-functional measurement that improves is that refactored code can be processed by standard synthesis tools, while the original code cannot. Refactoring of digital HDLs, albeit manual refactoring, has also been investigated by Synopsys fellow Mike Keating. His target is to make complex systems easier to understand, which increases the designers' productivity.
In the summer of 2008, there was an intense discussion about refactoring of VHDL code on the news://comp.lang.vhdl newsgroup. The discussion revolved around a specific manual refactoring performed by one engineer, and the question to whether or not automated tools for such refactoring exist.
As of late 2009, Sigasi is offering automated tool support for VHDL refactoring.
AMIQ DVT, an IDE for hardware design and verification, provides refactoring capabilities for e (verification language), SystemVerilog, Verilog and VHDL.
Read more about this topic: Code Refactoring
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