A look at a new approach called unit linting.
Active-HDL suggests an early-bug-detection flow via the integration with ALINT-PRO. The Active-HDL user has an access to both different linting methodologies supported by ALINT-PRO: full chip-level linting and unit linting. Both methods complement each other and are usually applied at different stages of the design cycle.
Unit linting is a relatively new approach that is well combinable with a flat elaboration mode – a special kind of elaboration, which considers HDL design units independent of each other in isolation, and is using the default values of generic parameters. This processing style is highly forgiving of missing elements within designs, such as not yet implemented parts of the hierarchy. This makes unit linting most valuable both when applied to individual source files, independent of other files, and right after files have been modified by a designer. Many highly valuable rule checks are therefore enabled very early, even almost immediately following writing the code itself, thus squeezing the feedback loop for the designer from days or weeks to just a few seconds.
The results are presented within the Active-HDL interface, so the designers do not need to stop the workflow and run another tool for the analysis. Unit linting does not eliminate a need to use full traditional linting, as the combination of independent units may create extra issues after integration. So it is also foreseen the direct run of ALINT-PRO for the full linting of the entire workspaces. Involving ALINT-PRO’s linting techniques allows detecting various types of bugs, defects and potential problems in the code at an early stage of the design cycle.
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