SpinalHDL Base Project

This repository is a base project to help Spinal users set-up project without knowledge about Scala and SBT.

If it is your are learning SpinalHDL

You can follow the tutorial on the Getting Started page.

More specifically:

instructions to install tools can be found on the Install and setup page
instructions to get this repository locally are available in the Create a SpinalHDL project section.

TL;DR Things have already been set up in my environment, how do I run things to try SpinalHDL?

Once in the SpinalTemplateSbt directory, when tools are installed, the commands below can be run to use sbt.

// To generate the Verilog from the example
sbt "runMain projectname.MyTopLevelVerilog"

// To generate the VHDL from the example
sbt "runMain projectname.MyTopLevelVhdl"

// To run the testbench
sbt "runMain projectname.MyTopLevelSim"

The example hardware description is into hw/spinal/projectname/MyTopLevel.scala
The testbench is into hw/spinal/projectname/MyTopLevelSim.scala

When you really start working with SpinalHDL, it is recommended (both for comfort and efficiency) to use an IDE, see the Getting started.

If you want to create a new project from this template

Change project name

You might want to change the project name, which is currently projectname. To do so (let’s say your actual project name is myproject; it must be all lowercase with no separators):

Update build.sbt and/or build.sc by replacing projectname by the name of your project myproject (1 occurrence in each file). The better is to replace in both (it will always work), but in some contexts you can keep only one of these two files:
- If you are sure all people only use sbt, you can replace only in build.sbt and remove build.sc
- If you are sure all people only use mill, you can replace only in build.sc and remove build.sbt
- Replace in both files for open-source project.
Put all your scala files into hw/spinal/myproject/ (remove the unused hw/spinal/projectname/ folder)
Start all your scala files with package myproject

Change project structure

You can change the project structure as you want. The only restrictions (from Scala environment) are (let’s say your actual project name is myproject):

you must have a myproject folder and files in it must start with package myproject
if you have a file in a subfolder myproject/somepackage/MyElement.scala it must start with package myproject.somepackage.
sbt and mill must be run right in the folder containing their configurations (recommended to not move these files)

Once the project structure is modified, update configurations:

In build.sbt and/or build.sc (see above) replace / "hw" / "spinal" by the new path to the folder containing the myproject folder.
In the spinal configuration file (if you kept it, by default it is in projectname/Config.scala) change the path in targetDirectory = "hw/gen" to the directory where you want generated files to be written. If you don’t use a config or if it doesn’t contain this element, generated files will be written in the root directory.

Update this README

Of course you can replace/modify this file to help people with your own project!

Mill Support (Experimental)

The Mill build tool can be installed and used instead of sbt.

// To generate the Verilog from the example
mill projectname.runMain projectname.MyTopLevelVerilog

// To generate the VHDL from the example
mill projectname.runMain projectname.MyTopLevelVhdl

// To run the testbench
mill projectname.runMain projectname.MyTopLevelSim