SystemVerilog formatter for our LowRISC-based guidelines (2-3G)

Coding conventions are an essential part of every large hardware (and software) project. They guide various non-functional aspects of the project and the source code like file organization, indentation, declarations, code alignment, naming conventions, and many others.

Coding conventions serve very important purposes:

• Improving maintenance by making the code more familiar to the maintainers
• Improve readability of the code and ease the process of reviewing code
• Improving the overall code quality by giving the project a more complete and clean feel
• Ensuring better compatibility to different tools by encouraging the use of simpler and better-supported constructs

At IIS we use the LowRISC guidelines [1] for systemverilog. Although the effort of following the guidelines continuously while writing new modules is very manageable, it becomes a major hassle when including 3rd-party and ill-formatted into our projects.

Having a tool that automatically formats any systemverilog source code to apply to the coding guidelines of LowRISC would massively reduce the manual refactoring effort while integrating 3rd-party code.