Papers & Publications
=====================

Zuspec: Pythonic Model-Driven Hardware Development
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**Abstract** - Designing and implementing hardware is challenging, and is getting more 
difficult each year as systems become more complex. Design and verification 
teams are looking to boost productivity as a way to keep pace, 
while also looking for ways to provide models of the design behavior to 
software teams earlier. The fragmented and esoteric nature of the languages 
and methodologies used for design and verification only make this more difficult. 
Zuspec is a unified, extensible Pythonic framework for multi-abstraction 
hardware modeling that simplifies the design and verification process and 
enables traditional and AI-driven automation.

:download:`Download Full Paper (PDF) <../papers/zuspec_pythonic_hw_dev/Zuspec_PythonicModelDrivenHardwareDesign.pdf>`

**Author:** Matthew Ballance

**Date:** September 2025

**Keywords:** Verilog, Hardware Modeling, PSS, Firmware, Python

Overview
~~~~~~~~

This paper presents Zuspec as a solution to the challenges of modern hardware 
development. Key topics include:

* The abstraction gap between specification and RTL implementation
* Model fragmentation across hardware development tools
* Why Python was chosen as the foundation language
* Multi-abstraction modeling capabilities
* Integration with existing hardware design flows
* Support for both traditional and AI-driven automation

The paper demonstrates how Zuspec bridges the gap between hardware and software 
development teams by providing a unified, Pythonic framework that is accessible 
to both disciplines while maintaining the rigor required for hardware design.

Citation
~~~~~~~~

If you use Zuspec in your research, please cite:

.. code-block:: bibtex

   @article{ballance2025zuspec,
     title={Zuspec: Pythonic Model-Driven Hardware Development},
     author={Ballance, Matthew},
     year={2025},
     month={September}
   }