10 Professional VHDL Coding tips

Besides knowing how to program in VHDL for FPGA projects, they will require from you extra coding skills to make your code more professional and robust. Here in this post I am going to list my findings regarding VHDL in the industry.

0) the basic for any coding is to avoid magic numbers. Numbers , constants in your code must be linked to a description, for VHDL you are going to use LOTS and LOTS of generic and constants to specify those numbers like: GI_PIXEL_WIDTH : integer := 8; for example.

1) that calls to make your code as generic as possible. For me, working with Image Processing I always set image width, image height, and pixel width at least, the code has to me able to handle many different kinds of resolutions.

2) Subtypes and types

3) Packages

4) generate and for loop

5) data types

6) pipeline

7) processes grouped by function

8) entities using port map with assingment =>

9) naming with pre fix according to the type