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PoC VHDL Coding Guide

Licensing

PoC is published under the Apache License, Version 2.0. Please, make sure you are able and willing to submit your contibutions to this license.

Naming

  1. VHDL sources have the file extension .vhdl.
  2. Prepend the name of an entity with its containing package using snake case, e.g.: arith_addw for the wide adder in package arith. Each module is implemented in its own source file, the name of which is <entity>.vhdl.
  3. Synthesizable module implementations are provided through an architecture named rtl.
  4. The name of a testbench entity copies the name of the tested module or package, to which _tb is appended. Its implementing architecture is named tb.

Formatting

Header

  • Include the configuration header to automatically configure common editors to the tab width of two spaces:
-- EMACS settings: -*-  tab-width: 2; indent-tabs-mode: t -*-
-- vim: tabstop=2:shiftwidth=2:noexpandtab
-- kate: tab-width 2; replace-tabs off; indent-width 2;
  • Document your package or module within a documentation header:
  • starting with a separator line matching /^--\s*={16,}$/,
  • containing the appropriate sections of Authors|Entity|Description|SeeAlso, and
  • providing the license statement:
-- ===========================================================================
-- Copyright 2007-2016 Technische Universitaet Dresden - Germany
-- 	     	       Chair for VLSI-Design, Diagnostics and Architecture
--
-- Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
-- you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
-- You may obtain a copy of the License at
--
--              http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
--
-- Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
-- distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
-- WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
-- See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
-- limitations under the License.
-- ===========================================================================

Whitespace

  • Indent with one tab character per indentation level.
  • Assume a tab width of two spaces.
  • Eliminate all trailing whitespace.

Coding Style

Capitalization

  1. Both snake and camel case are acceptable for signal and variable names as well as for labels. Be consistent in the capitalization when naming any such instance.
  2. Use all lower case for VHDL keywords (e.g. process, case, ...) and common standard types (e.g. integer, std_logic_vector).
  3. Use all upper case for constants and generic parameters.

Signal Initialization

  1. Specify an initiatilizer for all signals that are to represent sequential logic, i.e. some state. If their initial state is irrelevant, initialize them to a don't-care value as appropriate, e.g. (others => '-'). Typically the same initial state should be assigned upon a reset condition.
  2. Combinational signals never have a user-specified initializer.

Expressions

  1. Always use parentheses within expressions as soon as operator precedence is relevant and not trivial.
  2. Avoid extraneous parentheses around expressions already framed by their syntactical contexts, such as if ... then or while ... loop.
  3. Evaluate boolean expressions directly without comparing them to a boolean literal: use plain B instead of B = true and not B rather than B = false.

Instantiations

  1. Do not use the positional binding of generic parameters or ports.
  2. Prefer the instantiation of components if their declarations are readily available through designated packages.