FEL: Emacs, Verilog-mode, dinotrace

I have just pushed dinotrace to Fedora stable repositories. This will elevate the digital design experience for Emacs users.

Fedora users can soon install it with:

# yum install dinotrace emacs-dinotrace

I will briefly describe some features of this co-design possibility which dinotrace and verilog-mode provides on this blog post. However for more technical details, consult the manual.


1: Dinotrace is a waveform viewer which read .vcd files, generated by ghdl or iverilog. It includes a .el file for emacs which enables the designer to interact with the signals on dinotrace via emacs.

To load dinotrace-mode on emacs:
Alt-x dinotrace-mode

To load verilog-mode on emacs:
Alt-x verilog-mode

2: Verilog-mode provides designer with context-sensitive highlighting, auto indenting, and macro expansion capabilities to greatly reduce Verilog coding time. It also prevents additional human errors while coding. I will describe a few macro-expansion capabilities below.

3: Signal highlighting. Both Emacs and dinotrace can share the same colour to represent signals.

4: With annotation feature, the values of the signals with respect to the cursors' position on the waveform viewer is annotated on the Emacs. This will help designers to debug their complex designs efficiently.

The above screenshot shows a simple frequency divider coded with verilog-mode macros and the same verilog after the macros were automatically expanded by Emacs. For more details about other macros, consult the verilog-mode manual. Happy design on Fedora.