Ontology-guided Conceptual Analysis of Design Specifications

The integration of reusable IP blocks/cores is a common process in system-on-chip design and involves manually comparing/mapping IP specifications against system requirements. The informal nature of specification limits its automatic analysis. Existing techniques fail to utilize the underlying conceptual information embedded in specifications. In this paper, we present a methodology for specification analysis, which involves concept mining of specifications to generate domain ontologies. We employ a semi-supervised expert system with semantic analysis capability to create a collaborative framework for cumulative knowledge acquisition. Our system then uses the generated ontologies to perform component retrieval, drop-in-replacement analysis and design vs. test-plan comparisons. We demonstrate our approach by evaluating several IP specifications.