Coding Guidelines for VHDL and Verilog HDL

Question

Many threads on the Altera Forum are about basic issues with synthesis like warnings, errors, and writing the HDL properly to synthesize the intended logic. If you need to know how to fix your HDL, start by checking whether it follows a recommended coding style for synthesis.

The purpose of this thread is for people to post HDL coding guideline references that they recommend and to comment on others' recommendations. The references can be books, links to information available on the Internet, code examples posted directly here, etc.

altera_forum · Answer

For basic coding guidelines, see the Quartus II handbook, Volume 1, Section II, Chapter 6:  "Recommended HDL Coding Styles".

altera_forum · Answer

Recommendation by Randall at http://www.alteraforum.com/forum/showthread.php?p=3367#post3367:

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... my favorite book for people settling on a coding approach, HDL Chip Design by Doug Smith. He has, for example, all the typical flavors of a Flip Flop written with example code "The way it should be done" for both verilog and VHDL. There are little dialog boxes pointing to and explaining how each variation in the HDL text gives you a slightly different feature. It's not deep, but if you are looking for the right approach to basic synthesizable code, this is the ticket.

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altera_forum · Answer

The Quartus text editor provides many code examples in the "Insert Template" dialog box.  Use "Edit --&gt; Insert Template" while an HDL file is open in the text editor.

altera_forum · Answer

Another useful book is titled           The Designer’s Guide to VHDL by Peter J. Ashenden.

altera_forum · Answer

A VHDL Primer - by Jayaram Bhasker  VHDL : Programming by Example -  by Douglas L. Perry

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Coding Guidelines for VHDL and Verilog HDL

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