Code-level challenges and opportunities in hardware description languages: Insights from StackOverflow discussions

Modern embedded systems rely on a wide range of hardware platforms, including smartphones, laptops, wearables, and embedded consumer devices. Ensuring the correct and efficient execution of these software systems requires hardware components that are rigorously designed and verified. Verilog is one of the widely-used Hardware Description Languages (HDLs), enabling the design of complex and reliable systems. However, despite its wide adoption throughout the years, little is known about the challenges developers face when writing Verilog source code. Understanding these challenges is crucial for guiding the efforts of researchers, educators, and industry professionals. It also emphasizes the value of community forums in revealing broader issues related to HDLs. In this paper, we analyze StackOverflow (SO), the most popular crowd-sourced Q&A forum, to explore developer challenges in Verilog source code implementation. We collect and investigate 6147 SO questions related to Verilog. Thereafter, we identify the main discussed topics by leveraging the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) technique. Our analysis revealed 14 main topics using LDA that cover different aspects of Verilog programming, from the setup of a working environment, syntax errors, the interaction of a Verilog program with other artifacts (e.g., I/O, other peripherals), to the management of external aspects (e.g., memory). Our results show that Verilog questions are frequently asked on SO, with a median of 1045 views per question, demonstrating substantial interest from the community. However, 45% of these questions do not receive accepted answers. While coding tends to be the dominant topic, most questions combine coding with additional aspects of Verilog. The second most common topic is handling functions. All topics exhibit similar difficulty in terms of answer acceptance and popularity based on views, highlighting areas where improved community support and educational resources can be beneficial.