Time to exploit IDEs for hardware design and verification

Integrated Development Environments are solidly established in the software community. Eclipse, a major open source IDE, has been downloaded over 5 million times. Data published in 2008 by its rival, NetBeans, showed their IDE to be in use by over 2 million users worldwide. Commercial IDEs, such as Microsoft’s Visual Studio, are also popular.

The IDE’s advantages to software engineers are many, and most of them are relevant to engineers working on hardware verification. It is, after all, a software task. Languages used include C, C++ and SystemC, of course, but increasingly the dedicated verification languages e and SystemVerilog. Many aspects of hardware design are also language based, and can potentially benefit from the use of an IDE. Most digital designers use VHDL or Verilog, and Analog/Mixed-Signal (AMS) designers are increasingly taking up related languages such as VHDL-A and VerilogAMS.

By taking a closer look at the differences between the general software and the more specialized hardware verification communities, this article will attempt to explain the current growth and future prospects of IDEs in hardware verification. The implications for hardware design are also examined.

The modern IDE
A modern IDE is much more than a glorified editor, both in terms of features and architecture. Furthermore, highly optimized graphical interfaces make initial use quite intuitive, allowing advanced functions to be learnt as the need arises (more on this below).

Figure 1 presents a conceptual snapshot of an IDE’s main functions, with emphasis on the flow of information to the user from multiple sources. In addition, an IDE acts as a central point of control over tools in the environment. A key component of the IDE is therefore the context sensitive user interface. This must display the information and controls that the user needs at any point in time, while suppressing distracting information.

As well as being convenient, the IDE’s ability to control the toolchain, including simulators, has the advantage that different tools may be plugged into the system without changing the way in which they are driven. It therefore decreases the burden of learning new tool interfaces and increases the tool/vendor neutrality of the flow.



When oriented towards code development, a platform such as Eclipse may include, for example, toolchain management (compile, run/simulate, debug, revision control), code profiling and linting, function and class browsing/navigation, refactoring support (obsolescing terabytes of grep-sed-awk scripts!) and, of course, syntax and semantic checks with auto-completion. Please see the sidebar for more information on typical IDE features.

The fundamental, differentiating benefit of such systems, when compared to file editors and other file processing tools, is that they are aware of and manage the relationships between many different aspects of the design. That is, they operate on a project basis, relating multiple information sources to the file being worked on and communicating this to the user. Once an engineer has experienced the advantages of such a system over simple file-by-file editing, there is no looking back!

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