From Guesswork to Metrics: Measuring Constraint Complexity in SystemVerilog (Part 1)
🚀 Why Care About Constraint Complexity? In SystemVerilog, constraint blocks are a core part of constrained-random verification. As your testbenches scale up, these blocks can become: Hard to read Difficult to debug Slow to solve Prone to over- or under-constraining Yet most teams rely on intuition or manual review to judge constraint quality. What if we could measure complexity more objectively? This is where Halstead Complexity Metrics come in. 📐 What Are Halstead Metrics? Originally developed by Maurice Halstead in the 1970s for software code analysis, these metrics: Count operators and operands Compute values like: Volume (how much information the code conveys) Difficulty (how hard it is to understand) Effort (how much mental work is required) Estimated bugs (how likely the code is to be error-prone) They’ve been applied in languages like C/C++, Java, and P...