I really like AI!

I really appreciate the support of AI. When I think about the so-called education I received during my schooling! As a result, well, I'm making steady progress with VHDL. A few days ago, I tackled the Zilog SIO. This time, I started without the help of AI, only relying on basic personal knowledge and what I've recently learned thanks to AI's input. The result is an encouraging start in understanding how the SIO works. For now, I'm just getting the source code to work for an 8-bit data serial link, no parity, and one stop bit. The basics, basically. And well, the result is there:

 

 

In fact, this time I'm using AI not to gain a global understanding of the art of programming in VHDL, but to acquire additional syntax for information manipulation. Indeed, even though the RX and TX functions work, everything I've coded obviously includes all the necessary clock domain crossings and all the synchronization processes for the various processes.

It's indeed better to start the code this way because the SIO has different operating modes. For now, I'm dealing with the asynchronous mode, but I'll also need to manage the synchronous mode with flag detection, because that's the mode used on the EMU1 to manage the floppy disk drive.

Just to reliably manage the asynchronous mode, there's still a fair amount of code to generate and also a lot of testing. But still, it's totally satisfying to see the birth of functional VHDL code.

I must also add that, with practice, editing code using the Efinix software's VHDL editor is not the right solution. The main reason is that multi-windowing management is catastrophic. In this respect, what I'm observing aligns perfectly with my idea of development on Windows. Efinix probably uses a framework other than Microsoft's. Consequently, the problems related to that framework are added to those purely related to Windows management.

So I use Zed, which has a plugin for VHDL and can even perform some syntax checking. It's really, really good. I only use the Efinix IDE now to launch its 'standalone' tools, in fact : compilation, the various project configurations, test bench configuration, and using the internal signal analyzer. That way, I no longer have to worry about window inheritance because it's truly a nightmare on Windows, this thing!