RTL-Arrow: Hardware-to-Cloud Bridge

2026-06-11

AI Summary

This work addresses the inefficiency of manual VCD file analysis in hardware security research, where practitioners often laboriously inspect waveform traces to identify software-hardware interface vulnerabilities. To overcome this bottleneck, the paper introduces RTL-Arrow, a novel framework that automatically transforms VCD execution traces—generated from hardware simulation—into cloud-ready, structured data frames compatible with modern data science workflows. RTL-Arrow integrates VCD parsing, structured data frame construction, and cloud-native format encapsulation, complemented by an automated compilation pipeline that produces a high-performance toolchain. Released as an open-source library, RTL-Arrow substantially lowers the barrier to hardware-software co-verification, significantly enhancing the efficiency and scalability of cross-layer vulnerability detection and analysis.

Abstract

Hardware Security at Willamette is a Willamette University affiliated research group studying the hardware-software interface of security critical services. Within our program, we noticed many researchers spent considerable development time learning to understand and manually parse traces-of-execution of hardware designs which are used to identifying whether vulnerabilities or weaknesses arise at the hardware, software, or interface level. We propose the "RTL-Arrow" framework, a framework to compile performant binaries which bridge the hardware/data divide. We translate the outputs of simulated hardware execution, as "value change dumps" into modern data science workflows as cloud-ready "dataframes", to standardize program verification across the hardware and software levels. We describe our approach, its benefits, and lessons learned from the process of packaging and distributing these libraries for our security research program.

Problem

• hardware security
• execution traces
• value change dumps
• hardware-software interface
• vulnerability identification

Innovation

• RTL-Arrow
• value change dump
• dataframe
• hardware-software interface
• program verification