How to organize VHDL projects?


alex
  • Papilio newcomer Kosak asked how he can separate his VHDL source code from all the files that ISE generates. FPGA pro Alex responded with a great method to do so.

Well done Kosak, It is my hope that this forum will have more posts from people showcasing their projects step by step as they are developed covering both successes and failures, or showing their troubleshooting techniques. Then we can all pitch in with ideas. I attempted to do this with my latest Roboton posts, though given the lack of responses, perhaps it was too hard for people to follow or they may even have found the posts annoying and just skipped them :)

1) What I do for all my projects is create a special directory which I usually call "build" but any name will do. This directory can only be specified when creating a new project and I haven't found a way to change it through the GUI afterwards. If you already have created the project then open the .xise project file with a text editor and search for "working directory" which will contain just an empty string in quotes like so "", change that to "build" and save it. The next time you open the project it will ask you if you want to create this directory and answer yes. From now on, all the junk during the build will end up in this directory. I think there was a while ago a post or perhaps an article on the papilio page discussing this, The recommended way to create a project directory structure was along these lines:

root /     +-build     +-doc     +-source     +-tools    

Where "build" is the directory I mentioned above, "doc" contains project documentation, datasheets, useful references, etc, "source" (or "src" or "hdl" if you prefer contain the HDL source code of your project then "tools" can contain useful scripts for building parts of your project such as binary to VHDL converters to create ROM files or any other scripts or executables needed for your project.

2) You're right, even if your case statemnt covers all possible cases, you still get a warning during synthesis unless you have an "others" case (durrr!). If you just need "others" as a filler that does nothing I usually use "when others => null;"

3) Nothing wrong with that. Usually you do this if you're going to re-use that piece of code several times, then you turn it into a separate module. You can now include that module file into other projects that need a hex to 7seg decoder.



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