Frans Skarman

I am a PostDoc at Hochschule München working on open source tooling for more productive FPGA and ASIC development. My primary research project is Spade (https://spade-lang.org/), a hardware description language that makes hardware design more efficient using ideas from software languages. I am also the original author of Surfer (https://surfer-project.org/), a waveform viewer built to be snappy, extensible, and which runs everywhere.

News

Blog Posts

Publications

Spade — A Modern Hardware Description Language
Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems, January 2026

Frans Skarman, Gustav Sörnäs, Oscar Gustafsson

Surfer — An Extensible Waveform Viewer
CAV 2025

Frans Skarman, Lucas Klemmer, Daniel Große, Oscar Gustafsson, Kevin Laeufer

Scalable FPGA Implementation of Dynamic Programming for Optimal Control of Hybrid Electrical Vehicles
DASIP 2024

Frans Skarman, Oscar Gustafsson

Enhancing Compiler-Driven HDL Design with Automatic Waveform Analysis
FDL 2023

Frans Skarman , Lucas Klemmer , Oscar Gustafsson, Daniel Große

Spade: An Expression-Based HDL With Pipelines
OSDA 2023

Frans Skarman, Oscar Gustafsson

Abstraction in the Spade Hardware Description Language
LATTE 2023

Frans Skarman, Oscar Gustafsson

Spade: An HDL Inspired by Modern Software Languages
FPL 2022

Frans Skarman, Oscar Gustafsson

A Tool to Enable FPGA-Accelerated Dynamic Programming for Energy Management of Hybrid Electric Vehicles
IFAC World Congress 2020

Frans Skarman, Oscar Gustafsson, Daniel Jung, Mattias Krysander

Acceleration of Simulation Models Through Automatic Conversion to FPGA Hardware
FPL 2020

Frans Skarman, Oscar Gustafsson, Daniel Jung, Mattias Krysander