J
Jaco Naude
Guest
Hi
We have developed a cross-vendor firmware design management environment in our team. It integrates and sync's with many design environments (Sigasi, Mentor Graphics HDL Author etc) and takes care of the full implementation processes for multiple back-ends (Xilinx, Altera, Plunify etc.). It operates on something we call "file association databases". These databases are simple XML files containing details about file types used in the firmware world.. The idea is that they can evolve over time through knowledge added to them by experts in the field. At present, they cover Xilinx, Altera and Mentor Graphics tools.
The knowledge contained in these databases allows us to perform advanced operations on the files in a design. It knows which files are generated etc, allowing you to for example clean designs. Furthermore it can enforce directory structures and along with this it knows what needs to end up in version controlled repositories and what needs to stay out. This is very powerful, for example it allows you to do version control consistently across teams.. If you are an IP core provider, it will for example allows you to package your cores in a consistent way with little effort.
We've been using and tweaking it for about 2 years now so the result is a long list of features that is really useful to a firmware designer and we think that it will be useful to other firmware designers out there. At the moment we are not sure if we are going to open source it, or if we are going to take a different route.
We would like your feedback to help us determine if there is a need for such a tool externally.
More information about the project can be found at: http://scineric.csir.co..za.
A detailed blog post about the file association database solution can be found here: http://scineric.csir.co.za/?p=1083
Thanks,
Jaco
We have developed a cross-vendor firmware design management environment in our team. It integrates and sync's with many design environments (Sigasi, Mentor Graphics HDL Author etc) and takes care of the full implementation processes for multiple back-ends (Xilinx, Altera, Plunify etc.). It operates on something we call "file association databases". These databases are simple XML files containing details about file types used in the firmware world.. The idea is that they can evolve over time through knowledge added to them by experts in the field. At present, they cover Xilinx, Altera and Mentor Graphics tools.
The knowledge contained in these databases allows us to perform advanced operations on the files in a design. It knows which files are generated etc, allowing you to for example clean designs. Furthermore it can enforce directory structures and along with this it knows what needs to end up in version controlled repositories and what needs to stay out. This is very powerful, for example it allows you to do version control consistently across teams.. If you are an IP core provider, it will for example allows you to package your cores in a consistent way with little effort.
We've been using and tweaking it for about 2 years now so the result is a long list of features that is really useful to a firmware designer and we think that it will be useful to other firmware designers out there. At the moment we are not sure if we are going to open source it, or if we are going to take a different route.
We would like your feedback to help us determine if there is a need for such a tool externally.
More information about the project can be found at: http://scineric.csir.co..za.
A detailed blog post about the file association database solution can be found here: http://scineric.csir.co.za/?p=1083
Thanks,
Jaco