[Open-graphics] Prototype app to look at: A hardware IDE [release early, release often]

[Hamie]

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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