TABLE OF CONTENTS The synthesizable subset puts several constraints on the coding style you may use. Even with these restrictions, many less experienced hardware designers manage to write RTL code that is difficult to understand and maintain. There are no such restrictions with high-level modeling. With this complete and thorough freedom, it is not surprising that even experienced designers produce testbench code that is unmaintainable, fragile and not portable.
| Note | Write maintainable, robust code. |
There are no laws against writing bad code. If you do, the consequences do not involve personal fines or prison terms. However, the consequences do involve a real economic cost to your employer. Your code will need to be modified: either to fix a functional error, to extend its functionality or to adapt it to a new design. When (not if) your code needs to be modified, it will take the person in charge of making that modification more time than would otherwise have been required had the code been written properly the first time. Under extreme conditions, your code may even have to be re-written entirely. [1]
My first job after graduating from university was to design and implement a portion of a logic synthesis tool using the C language. In those days, I had been writing code in various languages for over eight years, and I measured my performance as a software engineer by the cleverness of my implementations of algorithms. I felt really proud of myself...
