TerosHDL: Making Hardware Development More Easy and Reliable

TheTerosHDL team has completed their NGI project. TerosHDL is an open source Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for Hardware Description Language (HDL) developers. The goal of TerosHDL is to provide HDL developers with the same functionalities available to software developers. NGI funding went towards improving the stability of TerosHDL, the creation of a command line version and simplifying the Graphical User Interface (GUI).

Multilingual and multiplatform

TerosHDL focuses on the development and integration of Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools in an IDE. EDA tools are used to design integrated circuits like ASICs (Application-Specific Integrated Circuits) and FPGAs (Field-Programmeble Gate Arrays). HDLs are used to to formally describe the structure and behavior of electronic circuits and TerosHDL supports three of them: VHDL, Verilog and SystemVerilog. The IDE integrates tools that are developed byTeros Technology as well as from other open source projects such asWaveDrom,VUnit andEdalize (alsofunded by NLnet). TerosHDL operates on three platforms: Linux, MacOS and Microsoft. It works as a plugin on top of the code editors VSCodium (open source) or VSCode (Microsoft). TerosHDL aims to make ASIC/FPGA development easier and more reliable in order to reduce the adaptation time for new users of hardware languages and help professionals streamline their development process.

Project outcomes: increasing stability and adding features

TerosHDL received funding from NLnet through theNGI Assure programme. Within the project the largest milestone was improving the stability of the IDE. To achieve this the backend was rewritten from JavaScript to TypeScript. Improvements were also made to the project manager such as adding support for OSVVM (the most popular open source framework for VHDL), VUnit and cross-file. To create safer hardware designs, verification libraries for VHDL were integrated. A command line version was created and the GUI interface was improved. And lastly new documentation was added including a tutorial for students.

Funding

TerosHDL is funded through theNGI Assure programme, a fund established by [NLnet](https://nlnet.nl/) with financial support from the European Commission's [Next Generation Internet](https://ngi.eu/) programme.

Do you also have an open source project that needs funding? You can apply for one of the [theme funds](https://nlnet.nl/themes/) of NLnet.