Prefix all signals in an instantiation

When you autocomplete an instantiation using the Sigasi Studio Content Assist, wire or signal names in the port map get a default value that is equal to the port name. In many designs, this can be insufficient. You might need to give the wires/signals in the portmap a prefix so they match the actual wire/signal names in the design.

Updating all wires or signals in a long port map can be a tedious task. However, using the Regular expressions capability of the Find/Replace dialog, pre-pending the prefix to the wires/signals can be done more efficiently.

In the screenshot, the Find field contains \((.*)\) to select everything between brackets. The outer brackets are escaped to match the actual brackets in the port map. The inner brackets capture the text between the brackets, which is back referenced with \1 in the Replace with field. More information on this regular expression can be found in the Java regex tutorial .

The prefix is written before the captured wire name to create the correct name. This way you easily can add a prefix to multiple or all wires/signals in the port map.

The example below shows how this can be done in VHDL instantiations too. Here the Find field matches the port assignment operator. The brackets capture all characters behind the assignment operator. These characters can be referenced with \1 in the Replaced with field.