vMAGIC / News: Recent posts

Hi folks!
We are proud to announce version 0.3.9 of the vMAGIC libraries with a number of improvements. Most importantly, this will be the last alpha release as we want to keep the API stable from beta release 0.4.0 onwards.
The current release particularly improves the handling of scopes, thus extending the code analysis features of vMAGIC. Also we have re-added the documentation to the binary release, and introduced a complete overhaul of the output framework. This last item is as yet transparent to the user, but it will be very important for the extension of the vMAGIC output options, i.e., the generation of XML code or Java code using vMAGIC (cf. http://vmagic.sf.net > Coming up next).
Looking forward to your feedback on http://sourceforge.net/projects/vmagic/forums/forum/880445
Ralf and christopher

The vMAGICParser has been tested against the VESTs VHDL test suite with good results (99.59% correct), with 11 errors, most of which are not true VHDL errors but a problem of our comparison techniques. Anyhow this should make you rather confident that whatever you want to parse with vMAGIC will work correctly.
Coming up next is an update on examples, both full scale applications and simple tests.

The new vMAGIC release includes a number of new features, such as a new type handling system, simplified expression building, customizable VHDL output, and (finally) support for several things that have so far been missing (like VHDL package building). Also, the new version uses much less memory and performance was dramatically improved. This of course implies some massive changes to the API, which now presents a much more consistent access to VHDL. We have split the package in two (vMAGICParser and vMAGIC) such that if you want to create stuff only, you don’t have to provide parser and ANTLR libs.
We are currently testing vMAGIC using formality, such that we can find bugs in the parser/writer combination. If you find any, please let us know via the SF forums. Demos and documentation are coming up; we’ll keep you posted on that!

We are working on a new API to make vMAGIC more user friendly and usable. Some of the things we are working on now are:

* Simplicity: The current version of vMAGIC uses abstractions of VHDL elements, which are, however, still very much inspired by their grammatical structure. The new version of vMAGIC will no longer refer to that structure; therefore we’ll be able to simplify a lot of operations on the code, e.g., expression building etc.... read more

This is a bug-fix summarizing all the work done on vMAGIC 0.2. As we are going to update the API in version 0.3.0 there will be no more releases in 0.2. Look out for news on the new API.

The vMAGIC release 0.2.0 is all about comments: where comments in VHDL code (except vMAGIC-tags) were disregarded completely in former versions, comment handling has been improved very much since:

* Support for comments in the VHDL output, very helpfull for documentation of generated code and when reviewing generated code manually
* Comments in front of some VHDL elements are preserved from a parsed template to the VHDL output (e.g. in front of architectures, entities and processes)
* vMAGIC tags are now supported on an element level and not only per file as in previous versions. These tags are also preserved in the output. Using vMAGIC tags the user can specify additional information to be passed to a vMAGIC based application.

Hi everyone!
We have now released two demo applications to show the power of vMAGIC, the VHDL Manipulation and Generation Interface. They can be tested at http://wwwhni.uni-paderborn.de/sct/extern/vmagic/demo either as a Java Web Start program or as a Java program for manual download.
The first example creates a wrapper design, connecting your design's I/Os to a PLX9045 PCI bus bridge.
The second example creates a multiplexer based ROM, the contents is defined using a user defined JavaScript source.
Enjoy, the vMAGIC Team

The vMAGIC library provides functionality for reading, manipulating and writing VHDL code (Very High Speed Integrated Circuit Description Language), enabling users to create their own code-generators, code-analyzers and more. Apart from a VHDL'93 compliant parser and writer, a high level programming model is provided: This model gives easy access to both high-level (registers, muxes,...) and low-level VHDL objects (declarations, assignments, assertions), resulting in a toolset for reliable and fast VHDL code generation.
Currently the project is in alpha phase, though it is rather stable. Please report any problems or errors that you find to the project forums.