Methods and systems for automatically verifying a hardware design based on a hardware specification document. Hardware descriptions to be designed according to a hardware specification document are created. A document writer can follow a specified procedure including the use of register mao tables, address map tables and register descriptions to create the hardware descriptions. Flags are embedded in the document which document is then saved for use by internal/external engineers. The used document, which has been saved as a text-only file, is read by a document parsing utility which creates a database of hardware components. Physical components of the hardware device can then be compared with elements maintained within the database upon an initial power-up of the hardware device. RTL auto-generation and software auto-generation modules can be used to ensure that the RTL hardware description complies with the hardware specification.