[myhdl-list] Re: Problems inferring RAM when it is buried in system

[Jan D. <ja...@ja...>]

George Pantazopoulos wrote:

> However, at this point I think I should rewrite it from scratch with unit
> testing and co-simulation in mind. Besides the online manual, do you know
> of any other complete examples or other resources to help get me started?

I think you have all the references for MyHDL-related info. In your
spare time background material on extreme programming (XP) techniques
may be useful reading.

Let me add some general remarks. Part of the vision behind MyHDL
is the idea that hardware design can be viewed as a specialized
software engineering discipline that can therefore benefit from
popular software development techniques, such as unit testing.

This is certainly not a mainstream viewpoint. Mainstream hardware
verification nowadays goes in totally different directions, such as
heavy use of embedded, complex assertions and constraint-driven random
testing.

So here again, we are in pioneering mode. I don't think anyone else
is considering to use unit testing (in the XP way) for hardware design.
I am very happy to hear that Tom seems completely sold on the
idea. But there's a lot of room left for exploration. I can
only hope that more people will pick it up - and also take the
time to document their findings.

Final practical remark: the standard unittest is nice, but
py.test may be an easier way to write unit tests. Disclaimer:
I haven't used it myself a lot, and you need to install
a subversion client to get it.

Greetings,

Jan

-- 
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