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Message
From: Brewster Porcella<brewsterporcella@c...>
Date: Tue Feb 20 18:02:49 CET 2007
Subject: [oc] data base for ASIC/FPGA develpers
All:I've used a tool like this based on exceed.... with a bunch of perl scripts to generate RTL. I hated it. There is no question that design effort was INCREASED rather than lessened by the "tool". There is some real value in forcing standards - register designs - register documentation standards... but that can be done with good design practices.. It does not need to be enforced by tools. None of these tools can insure useful (or even accurate) register descriptions.... it takes good review methods to do this. I've often wondered why people don't think about the most effective ways to use standard design languages (like verilog) to simplify the design process. If the goal is to insure good user documentation, there are many available ways to extract comments from standard design files. bj Porcella
571 245-6861
----- Original Message -----
From: Guy Hutchison
To: Discussion list about free open source IP cores
Sent: Tuesday, February 20, 2007 11:15 AM
Subject: Re: [oc] data base for ASIC/FPGA develpers
I have used similar tools before at previous companies and created a lightweight version of the tool for my TV80 project. It has a fairly simple set of registers it can generate, and the RTL it outputs is specific to the Z80 bus, but if you're looking for something to use as a starting point or for ideas I'd look at that.
Like previous posters, I would stay away from a database solution and stick with something simple and XML-based. XML parsers are a dime a dozen nowadays and you can easily write multiple tools to look at your file and pull out the information they need to write RTL, create reg descriptions, etc.
The tool I used before was able to generate multiple "slave" files that could be hooked up to a single master, allocate register spaces and do address maps, automatically generate documentation, and automatically create tests which would check the operation and integrity of the register map. It was web & database based, and the problem with that was mainly unnecessary complexity (now you have another server that can go down), and difficulty building new tools to interface to the database. Also, if you're worried about scalability, command-line tools have no difficulty generating millions of gates worth of RTL in under a second. :)
If you're interested in building something open-source, I would be interested in collaborating on it.
- Guy
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