Papers & Publications

Zuspec: Pythonic Model-Driven Hardware Development

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.

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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:

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