Program slicing on vhdl descriptions and its evaluation

Providing various assistances for design modifications on HDL source codes is important for design reuse and quick design cycle in VLSI CAD. Program slicing is a softwareengineering technique for analyzing, abstracting, and transforming programs. We show algorithms for extracting/removing behaviors of specified signals in VHDL descriptions. We also describe a VHDL slicing system and show experimental results of efficiently extracting components from VHDL descriptions.