Understanding a hardware design is tough. When entering a large team as a new member, when extending a legacy design, or when documenting a new design, lacks in understanding the details of a design are major obstacles for productivity. In software engineering topics like software maintenance, software understanding, reverse engineering are well established in the research community and partially tackled by tools. In the hardware area the re-use of IP-blocks, the growing size of designs and design teams leads to similar problems, which mostly have yet to be solved by the hardware community.
The core audience are practitioners working in circuit design and to researchers interested in design automation as well as researchers and/or industry representatives from the fields of visualization and natural language processing.