Honored Contributor
Honored ContributorExchange between vendor tools is and always will be problematic. They all claim to support exchange-ability but in essence they all want to lock the customer down. So that leaves the 'text' format as the common factor if you want portability.
Anyway most of us have chosen to use (only?) Altera, and most of us have no real interest in portability towards other vendors, I presume. The BDE is a carry-over from the MAX-II software and it looks like it hasn't evolved much over time. But it looks very usable. In my work I am constantly drawing 'schematics' on paper interconnecting building blocks, which I translate in VHDL text later. Further on in the development cycle these handmade drawings have to be redone in electronic format to document what has been built. I gather the .bdf files could serve both purposes at once. FvM's remark on Quartus BDE missing support for structured data types may be truly valid. I looked on the web for "VHDL structured data types" but couldn't find much, can you give us an example on this? (we'll learn something ...)
