Adam Wilson
FirstEDA
Blog: The value of the right text editor?
Why Sigasi’s approach to redefining the humble editor provides a step change in VHDL productivity
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All creative people understandably have personal preferences when it comes to the tools they use for crafting their work. Programmers or, in my specific experience hardware designers, are creative people and as a consequence they too have personal preferences when it comes to design tools, in particular their choice of text editor. And why shouldn’t they?! This is the part of their job when they actually get to create something, as opposed to the endless verification, validation and documentation that follows…
Whilst the majority of EDA tools are usually standardised across an organisation, the choice of editor is something that is often left to the individual engineers themselves. Managers view editors as low-cost (often free) and as long as their engineers are happy (read ‘productive’), they can have their choice. What does it matter? It’s just a text editor! The function is same, the output is the same. Or is it?
For quite some time now, software designers have been enjoying the benefits of Integrated Development Environments (IDE) that offer more functionality and ultimately more value than those traditionally available to the hardware designer. The most obvious example of this is Eclipse.
Eclipse is the most popular IDE in the world, supporting many languages. Features have become standard, such as automatic code checking and logic which verifies that code meets company guidelines. Whereas for hardware designers these have traditionally been separate tasks altogether, often requiring individual disparate tools and more investment in both time and money. Until now…
Eclipse is open source and many third-parties have developed add-ons making it even more valuable. Sigasi is one of these third-parties. Their goal? To bring the benefits of the Eclipse platform to the hardware designer, in turn making HDL design an easier, more efficient and more enjoyable task.
Sigasi offer a design creation tool, based on the Eclipse platform, which replaces your standard text editor. By providing advanced features, Sigasi helps to manage the complexities of HDL design. Its ultra-fast built-in compiler runs transparently in the background and reads your code in real-time as you type. It completes VHDL constructs automatically, based on its comprehension of your project’s design and its code checker offers instant error reporting, by highlighting errors in multiple places and then proposes fixes instantly. Other features such as intelligent navigation, ‘mouse-over’ descriptions, documentation and live graphical previews help to further distinguish Sigasi from standard text editors and establish itself as one of the most intuitive and intelligent HDL development tools available.
So, is there value in a design team standardising on an editor? Well, if the chosen solution is one that offers all the advantages of a software IDE such as Eclipse, then there could be significant benefits. You will need less time to write better VHDL code, there will be more consistent formatting of code and you will be able to free up time at code reviews as a result. Ultimately what this sort of tool ensures is that all the code being created is of a consistently high quality, and in hardware design what is more important than that?
Live webinar: Sigasi – not all HDL editors are created equal
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Discover why designs teams are seeing the value of standardising on this class-leading eclipse-based IDE for VHDL design.
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WEDNESDAY 3 JUNE – 14:00-15:00 BST (15:00-16:00 CEST)