SystemVerilog formatter for our LowRISC-based guidelines (2-3G)
From iis-projects
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.
Project Content
The project can be divided in the following sub tasks:
- Abstract the coding guidelines to a set of machine-understandable rules
- Use python to check a given source files against each rule and report the line or construct in violation with the rule
- Create a python tool that applies the rules to the source code and produces nicely formatted code
Prerequisites
Preferably: Experience with Python