4.4 Fast HDL Code Editing

There are several features that are particularly useful in generating code segments for Verilog and VHDL files.

Instantiate a Component into an Editor Window

•Left click into the editor window at the place where the module should be instantiated.

•In the Project window, right click on the Component and choose Instantiate in Editor from the context menu.

•The code fragment will appear at the cursor point in the current editor.

•Now you can edit the instantiation name or port arguments as desired.

Adding the ports of a Module to a diagram for HDL stimulus creation

•To extract ports of a particular module into a diagram, right click on a module and choose Extract Ports Into Diagram from the context menu. These signals come in as drive signals to which waveforms can be added to create HDL stimulus.

Text Slide In and Out

Add or remove a text string to several lines at one time. This is particularly useful in commenting out blocks of code.

•Select several lines of text, then right click and choose one of the Text Slide In/Out menus. The Slide In adds text, and the Slide Out removes text.

•The Text Slide dialog will open and you can enter the text to add or remove from the selected lines.

Miscellaneous Context Menu Functions

Many functions are available from the right click context menu

•Select text and then choose Cut or Copy to insert the text into the buffer.

•Paste puts text in the buffer into the text file at the cursor point.

•Undo will undo the last edit change.

•Find/Replace allows you to find and replace text in the current editor window.

•Find In Files searches (greps) for text across multiple files.

•Jump to Line Number moves the cursor to a specified line number in the file.

•Open File opens the file dialog and lets you choose a file to open.

•Save saves the current file.

•Save As opens the file dialog to save the current file to a new file name.

•Rename changes the name of the current file.

•Insert Breakpoint adds a line breakpoint at the current cursor position.

•Add Breakpoint opens the breakpoint dialog, allowing you to create time and condition breakpoints ( 2.4 Breakpoints ).

•Insert Diagram Calls is a TestBencher feature to add Transactor Apply calls into the text file.

•Class Methods is a TestBencher feature to open the Class Methods dialog.

•Add to Project adds the file to the User Source Files folder of the current project.

•Find File in Project will search for the file in the project window.

•Print sends the current file to the printer.

•Move to a New Window opens the text file in a different window than the tab of the current window.

•Clear Text deletes all the text in the file. This is particularly useful in clearing out log files.

•Close File closes file and removes the tab that it was displayed in.