Code Comprehension and Reuse

Posted on 2012-08-23 by Philippe Faes
Tagged as: code comprehensioncode reuse

Understanding a big body of code is always a difficult task. But the correct tools will help you speed up and do in hours what would otherwise take a week.

Key Features:

  • Power navigation / VHDL code browsing
    • Jump to any declaration in one click
    • Jump to case statements in state machines
    • Jump between instantiation, component and entity / architecture
  • Code comprehension without clicking your mouse: Hovering
  • Show design hierarchy, even if the code is broken [Hierarchy View]
  • Find where signals are used
  • Semantic highlighting: use different colors for signals, variables, constants, …
  • See the values of generics [Hierarchy View]

All of these inspection features work even if the design is incomplete or broken with our [recovering-vhdl-parser-0]

Because Sigasi’s built-in VHDL compiler analyses your entire project. Even if there are errors, the parser recovers and works its way through the rest of your code. Sigasi Pro uses the resulting information to answer your questions, like:

  • Where did I use this signal?
  • How many bits are in this port?
  • What is the value of this constant?
  • Which package contains the declaration for that data type?

Without Sigasi, all of these questions would take a lot of mental energy, scrolling, opening files and writing down notes on paper.

Nice, but not-so-unique features

See also

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