Why does legoHDL exist?
Design reuse is of importance in any development environment. For hardware designing in HDL, this is even more important as more complex designs follow a hierarchal approach. The benefits to resuing designs are identified as saving time and resources while increasing productivity.
From a VLSI Technology paper about VHDL coding techniques, design reusability means that the design is:
- able to solve a general problem
- well coded, documented, and commented
- rigorously verified
- technology independent
- synthesis tool independent
- simulator independent
- application independent
legoHDL is the solution to the design resusability challenge.
legoHDL:
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enables developers to write code once and have it maintained in its single location; enforcing the DRY principle.
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decouples your HDL code from EDA tools, producing highly portable designs.
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provides quick access to previous designs for instant integration. legoHDL can return the required code to instantiate any of your designs in VHDL or Verilog.
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empowers developers through its management commands to effortlessly install HDL code for usability, reference specific versions of a design, and release new versions.
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sets up an environment to take advantage of natural language constructs, such as VHDL libraries and packages, that target resuability.
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places zero to little additional work on the developer to get existing code compatible with legoHDL