In this blog post I want to discuss the different ways that Scineric can interface with external environments. This allows you to keep doing your actual development in your existing environment, while managing your files, builds and packages in Scineric.
Integration with text based VHDL environments
Scineric Workspace does not have a built in editor apart from the one found in the Scripting mode which allows you to edit Tcl scripts. We have thought about adding a built in editor on numerous occasions, and everytime we decision that we will rather spend available time working on the core functionality of Scineric.
We decided to solve this problem since we want to allow people (like me if I had the choice) who prefer to develop using plain VHDL, to integrate Scineric into their workflows without too much effort. This lead to the latest plugin addition to Scineric: An easy to use Sigasi plugin:
The video demonstrated the very first version of the plugin. Since we don’t really use Sigasi ourselves, we would love to get feedback on how you find the integration and what you think can make it even easier to use.
Integration with schematic based environments
If you work in any environment that can output one of the input formats that Scineric supports, you can integrate your design workflow quite nicely with the file and build management capabilities found in Scineric through the merge architecture. An example of this is an environment like Mentor Graphics HDL Author which is able to generate .prj scripts for Xilinx designs, and .tcl scripts for Altera designs.
This integration is nicely demonstrated in the video below.
Integration through IP-XACT standardization
Because Scineric uses the industry standard IP-XACT format to manage things, you can open any IP-XACT component definition in Scineric. You can make changes to it and Scineric will save only the parts that it changed, leaving all other vendors’ extensions untouched.
Integration using the Tcl environment
The last way that you can integrate Scineric into your working environment is through the integrated Tcl environment. Scineric has a fully documented scripting reference to help you write your own scripts. Using the scripting environment you can create, manipulate and extend designs at runtime.
Are you using an environment that you want to integrate with Scineric? Let us know about it.
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