HDL Coding Standards

HDL Coding Standards (Safety-Critical Designs)

In order to prevent potentially unsafe attributes of HDL code from leading to unsafe design issues, the use of HDL coding standards is recommended by various safety-critical industries such as DO-254. The HDL coding standards must be defined, reviewed and documented.  ALINT™ is a fully automated design rule checker equipped with industry-proven VHDL/Verilog standards and provides an automated code review. The VHDL/Verilog standards included cover essential areas in HDL coding such as coding style, readability, simulation, clock/reset management, design reuse, coding for safe synthesis and implementation, clock domain crossings (CDC) and design for test (DFT).

ALINT™ also provides robust documentation features beneficial to reporting, audits and reviews. ALINT™ features a Violation Viewer for detected violations and Exclusion Management mechanism that allows associating “irrelevant” violations with the appropriate justification comments. Being tightly integrated with the coding standard violation analysis and reporting interfaces, these features enable push-button reporting and facilitate the desirable practice of creating quality design artifacts essential to obtaining compliance with the requirements outlined in the various safety-critical design assurance standards.

Usage & Benefits:

• Reduces cost of review vs. manual labor
• Based on comprehensive knowledge base of industry best practices and design expertise
• Code is more consistent and efficient vs. manual review approach
• Reviews can be performed more often, a good match with DO-254 philosophy
• Integrated debug environment for efficient design analysis and documentation

Includes:

• 10-day ALINT™ Evaluation Software
• DO-254 Best Practice Design Rule Set

Additional Resources:

ALINT™ 2012.01 What’s New Presentation

Automated Code Reviews for Safety-Critical Designs Presentation