Frequently Asked Questions

When we call Sigasi Visual HDL (SVH) an “HDL platform,” what we mean is that it’s the place that chip designers and verification engineers can use to shift their hardware design language (HDL) specifications and register transfer language (RTL) projects to the left. Our platform fits perfectly integrated with Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code (VS Code), the most popular integrated development environment (IDE)  to create a platform that gives users better insight into the design process.

The “shift-left methodology” is about the principle that catching errors much earlier in the design can save a lot of money, certainly when compared to catching them towards the end of the design. Shifting left prevents costly mistakes and makes hardware design more efficient from the start.

The terminology comes from how we depict the flow of a design moving from a concept to a real chip. That starts at the left-hand side of the drawing board and ends up at the right-hand side. So if you shift your checks and error-catching to the left, you shift it to earlier stages of the design.

At times, you’ll see Sigasi talks about “extreme shift left,” and this is about when we really bring cutting edge introspection to chip design. Our dynamic diagrams are an example of this.

The heart of our solution is an incredibly fast, real-time check engine. As users type, without having to wait hours for a compiler or a linter to do a full analysis, they get immediate feedback on their designs. Our diagrams update in real time and errors and warnings disappear as you fix them.

SVH lets users move seamlessly through hierarchy views and graphics that update instantaneously as they make changes in their code, in real time.

SVH is fully integrated with Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code (VS Code), the most popular IDE with a rich marketplace of productivity tools. It includes sophisticated applications to easily use git and GitHub Source Control Management, as well as a selection of utilities to facilitate mundane tasks like extracting TODO comments or bookmarking important sections in HDL code.

It depends on your needs and on what kind of team you’re working in

• Designer Edition meets the specific needs of individual engineers who need introspection of their HDL projects. It includes all the essential guidelines and tools to create quality code, from hovers and autocompletes to quick fixes, formatting, and rename refactoring.
• Professional Edition builds on the Designer Edition to incorporate more complex features focused on verifying HDL specifications. These include graphic features like block diagram and state machine views, and UVM support.
• Enterprise Edition offers features needed by large engineering teams, including command-line interface capabilities to safeguard the code repository and ensure better handoff to verification groups. It also includes documentation generation, all part of a better HDL hand-off.
• Community Edition is a FREE fully functional edition that lets users limitlessly explore SVH’s powerful features for non-commercial uses and evaluation. It’s an excellent tool for students and teachers to use to better learn the fundamentals of HDL design. Professors who want to use Sigasi at scale in their classes can get in touch to discuss mutually beneficial educational partnerships with the company.

Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is consistently the most popular integrated development environment (IDE) according to the Stack Overflow Annual Developer Survey , and many of the reasons it’s so popular are exacty the reasons we want to fully integrate our SVH platform into it.

• VS Code has a rich marketplace of productivity tools, including sophisticated applications to easily use git and GitHub Source Control Management, as well as a selection of utilities to facilitate mundane tasks like extracting TODO comments or bookmarking important sections in HDL code. It also has plenty of out-of-the-box support for a wide variety of languages.
• VS Code offers great stability and project governance, including better support for bigger projects, improving user experience and reducing crashes. It has a light memory footprint and remarkably fast performance, including an efficient startup time.
• User experience in VS Code also benefits from a clean, modern, and intuitive interface with a responsive GUI. It also has a fully functional integrated terminal, making command line use all the easier.
• VS Code also allows for easier generative AI integration. Indeed, the SVH 2024.1 extension introduced SAL, Sigasi’s AI Layer, which can let users generate, check, and explain HDL code without having to navigate out of their Sigasi project. Integrating with VS Code augments our offerings as a platform that gives users better insight into the design process.

At the end of the day, focusing on a single platform also means that we can improve our development process. Our team can dedicate more strength and speed to upgrades with undivided attention.

At Sigasi, we highly value our users and want to support them as much as we can. This includes folks working in older versions of our products, including Sigasi Studio, or in other environments, like Eclipse. As such, we’ve kept our support archive for you, right here.

We get that sometimes an update isn’t convenient until a project ends, though we highly recommend you update as soon as you can!