On Sunday 01 July 2007 21:09, Timothy Normand Miller wrote: > For some time now, I have been tinkering with the idea of developing a > hardware IDE of sorts to help with chip design projects. Like with > many sort of programming tasks, there are tedious and error-prone > aspects of coding Verilog, and I thought it would be nice to have a > tool that would take care of many of these things for me. There are > some tools already to do this (e.g. Renoir), but they're expensive and > not Free Software. > > One of the most bothersome problems with Verilog is with gluing > modules together. Say you've designed three modules that need to be > attached together as a pipeline. The typical approach would be to > write another module in which to instantiate them, with wires > indicating how they connect to each other and the enclosing module. > My most common mistakes are in forgetting to declare a wire that I > used to connect ports (thereby implying a single-bit bus even if the > ports are wider) and declaring the wrong bus size. Some of these can > be hard to locate and debug. Another problem is with refactoring, > such as if you want to insert another pipeline stage. Plus, there's > all of the typing and the boredom and potential for typos and other > errors. > > So I have been tinkering with a proof-of-concept prototype as a way to > demonstrate some of the ideas I have in mind. > > The first major thing I want to do is "draw" logic hierarchies. I > have this approach in mind: At any given moment, you're looking at a > particular module in the hierarchy and its immediate children. You > can add ports to the module and its children and connect wires/busses > visually. You can then expand a child module, making it the current > level, giving you access to its children, etc. Add code to the > modules for functionality, and export it as Verilog, ready for > simulation and synthesis. Make drastic changes and reexport, > something that would otherwise have taken hours. >
Nice. = [deleted] > > Here's the location: > > http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~millerti/HIDE.zip > > NOTE: It's a NetBeans project. You can look at all the code without > NetBeans, but NetBeans is a nice IDE that I find to be quite helpful. > I'm quite new to Java, and it takes some of the pain out of the > process. I'm not using any of the NetBeans GUI builder stuff, though, > because all of my widgets are custom. > You're joking about eay to use right? I just installed it, never seen it, and for the life of me can't find out how to actually open an existing project and get it to compile... I guess I'll have to do some poking around & read some docs... I hate it when you have to read the docs. > And before anyone complains about Java, that's the only language I Not even a snide comment... (Besides the mandatory Write Once, Crash Everywhere :) I agree about the C++ BTW... And I'm not sure what other toolkit you could have used either... Although IMO Qt is OK... Even if it is C++. Apart from TCL/Tk of course... > could find that had both a relatively mature GUI toolkit and one that > would look relatively native on any platform, including MacOS X. I've > tried other languages and toolkits, but Qt, for instances, always > resulted in errors that I can't decipher. Also, I hate C++. I'm an > expert in the language, but I have come to despise it due to all of > the unnecessary cruft compared to other languages (compare to Ruby, > for instance). Java isn't vastly better than C++, but it's better > enough. I really like Ruby, but it's terrible for GUIs (mostly due to > lack of documentation). I have considered looking at JRuby. Anyhow, > this rambling here is primarily so that the issue of language/toolkit > simply won't come up again. Maybe YOU like something better, but I > don't have time or energy to learn it.
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