Linty HDL Designer

Linty HDL Designer checks over 220 rules in real-time on your HDL (VHDL, Verilog/SystemVerilog and Tcl) code. It detects bugs, vulnerabilities and maintainability issues. Then, it provides detailed description for all issues, so you can easily fix them before the code is pushed to your SCM (Git, Subversion, etc.).

Linty HDL Designer provides detailed and actionable reports on Clock Domain Crossings (CDC), Finite State Machines (FSM), combinatorial loops, etc. To easily investigate issues, those reports provide diagrams, graphs, direct links to source code, etc.

Linty HDL Designer is the first component of the Linty code quality tool chain. Check Connected Mode section and Linty Services website to implement a powerful continuous integration pipeline on your HDL code, to ensure that any piece of code you write is bug-free, secure and highly maintainable.

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Installation and Configuration

Prerequisites

Linty HDL Designer is built upon SonarLint. If already installed, SonarLint must be removed before installing Linty HDL Designer.

Free Version

The free version requires no configuration and the following rules will be checked as soon as you start typing VHDL ( .vhdl or .vhd files), Verilog/SystemVerilog (.v or .sv files) or Tcl (.tcl files) code:

• VHDL (31 rules)
• Verilog/SystemVerilog (25 rules)
• HDL (rules applying to both VHDL and Verilog code) (3 rules)
• Tcl (9 rules)

Issues are displayed on the PROBLEMS panel.

Paid Version

If you're happy with the free version, you're welcome to request a trial license for the paid version to be able to:

• Check hundreds of additional rules including clock domain crossings (CDC), finite state machines (FSM), latches, combinatorial loops and many more.
• Select and parametrize which rules should apply to your IP / project
• Deploy Linty in your continuous integration flow to check every commit and pull/merge request (GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, etc.): pull/merge request decoration with issues, blocking merge if quality requirements are not met, etc.

Full list of available rules:

• VHDL
• Verilog
• HDL
• Tcl

The only required configuration is to link your workspace in VS Code to your project analyzed on your Linty platform. Then, quality profiles, exclusions and any pieces of configuration will be automatically applied in VS Code.

Additional Extensions

To fully benefit from all features, we recommend to manually install the following powerful extensions or install the Linty HDL Designer Extension Pack that contains all those extensions:

	Extension	Description
	VHDL for Professionals (V4P) by ViDE-Software	Our partner who provides a powerful extension to write VHDL code (code colorization, formatting, navigation, auto-completion, hierarchy and many more).
	Linty Graph Visualization	To visualize and navigate through graphs and diagrams

Usage

Connected Mode (Paid Version)

Linty HDL Designer can connect to Linty to synchronize information on your project. By binding your VS Code workspace with the corresponding project in Linty, you will benefit from:

• Issue detection based on the same quality profile (set of rules) you configured in Linty
• Exclusions being taken into account
• Issues marked as Won't fix or False positives in Linty being removed from VS Code PROBLEMS panel
• And many more

Here are the few steps to connect your VS Code workspace to your Linty project:

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Detailed Rule Description (Free and Paid Version)

For every issue, you can open its related detailed rule description.

Focus on New Code (Paid Version)

You can either watch all issues or only focus on issues on new code. To toggle from one mode to another, click on Linty HDL Designer focus in the Status bar.

Open in IDE (Paid Version)

Some rules such as detection of Clock Domain Crossings (CDC) or combinatorial loops cannot be checked in real-time because they require some time to get processed. Thus, you will not see such issues appear on the PROBLEMS panel.

However, you can open and browse those issues in VS Code. From the Linty web interface, navigate to any issue and click on the Open in IDE button. VS Code opens the right file at the right location, so you can start investigating the issue. A panel with the rule description is also opened. For issues with multiple secondary locations, you will be able to browse those locations through the LINTY HDL DESIGNER ISSUE LOCATIONS view.

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Reports (Paid Version)

Run Local Analysis

Prior to browsing reports, a local Linty analysis must be run through Ctrl + P + Linty HDL Designer: Run Local Analysis. Then, run a local Linty analysis every time you want to sync reports with the current state of your code.

Before running your first local analysis, a few properties must be set once:

• tabbyCadLicense: Path to your Tabby CAD license file
• scannerVersion: Version of the lintyservices:linty-scanner Docker image to run
• scannerCache: Path to your Linty scanner cache directory. Directory must exist.

Go to Extension Setting > Linty: Local Analysis:

And edit in settings.json:

Available Reports

• Design Hierarchy
• Clock Domain Crossings (CDC)
• Finite State Machines (FSM)
• Combinatorial loops

To easily investigate issues, those reports provide diagrams, graphs, direct links to source code, etc.

To open the report home page: Ctrl + P + Linty HDL Designer: Open Full Report.

To directly browse a specific report:

• Design Hierarchy: Ctrl + P + Linty HDL Designer: Open Design Hierarchy Report
• CDC: Ctrl + P + Linty HDL Designer: Open CDC Report
• FSM: Ctrl + P + Linty HDL Designer: Open FSM Report
• Combinatorial loops: Ctrl + P + Linty HDL Designer: Open Combinatorial Loop Report

All Commands

All commands are available through Ctrl + P + Linty HDL Designer.

Avoid Redundant Checks

VHDL for Professionals provides a few checks that could be redundant with Linty HDL Designer. Thus, to avoid any noise, we recommend you to deactivate its checker. To do so, add a .config.v4p file at the root of your repository with the following content:

[settings]
  V4p.Settings.ErrorChecker.Enabled = False

Project Sample

To get an overview of all features, feel free to browse our project sample.

Debug

For some environments, a restart of VS Code is necessary to make all features work.

Please, allow some time after setting up connected mode because, depending on your network connection, synchronization to your Linty platform may take some time.

If it still does not work, get debug information:

1. Set analyzer logs to display in Linty HDL Designer output through the following extension settings:

2. Ctrl + P + Linty HDL Designer: Enable Verbose Logging

3. Ctrl + P + Linty HDL Designer: Show Log Output

Compatibility Matrix with Linty Toolbox Components

License

This confidential and proprietary software may be used only as authorized by a licensing agreement from Linty Services.

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ALL RIGHTS RESERVED