Sigasi's Blog

The LEON3/GRLIB project from Airoflex Gaisler (formerly Gaisler Research) is one of the largest open source VHDL projects. It contains almost 700 VHDL files, for a total of 600.000 lines of code. The project is based on the AMBA on-chip bus and serves as a framework for building SoCs. It is used in consumer electronics, automotive and aerospace applications.

A few months ago Richard Goering blogged about the 5 greatest moments in EDA innovation. Here is the list: Spice, Verilog, Multi-level logic synthesis, Automated IC layout and Structured VLSI design.

I would make some minor edits to the list. Instead of Verilog, I would nominate VHDL and Verilog, because I believe we have at least as much to thank to VHDL as to Verilog. Instead of multi-level logic synthesis, I would list RTL synthesis, because that has been the standard for digital design standard during the last 20 years. It builds on logic synthesis by adding the concept of synthesizing from clocked hardware descriptions written in a hardware description language.

On a sidenote, it's kind of funny that Mr. Goering mentions a lot of synthesis technology contributors, but not Synopsys, the company that made it all happen. But OK, that's Cadence company policy I guess.

Overall, I agree with the list. Its most remarkable feature is that all these great innovations are quite old. By 1985, the year I graduated as an engineer, the fundamental research and development for all of them had been done. By 1990, the year I became a hardware designer for real, all were well-established solutions. In fact, if the list would have been compiled 15 years ago, I think it would have been exactly the same.

The youngest of these innovations is logic synthesis. This confirms my experience that it was a one-of-a-kind innovation, as I testified in a previous blog post. However, it also means that nothing as great has happened in EDA during my career as a digital hardware designer.

That is certainly not what I expected on my graduation day. Back in 1985, there was a feeling of great enthusiasm about digital VLSI design and about EDA as its prime enabler. It looked like a vast unexplored field with lots of exciting innovations waiting to happen. It's quite a shock to realize that the greatest moments were in fact already behind us.

Decorated Splash Screen I wanted to add a decorator to the splash screen our RCP application Sigasi HDT to give our users a visual clue about which version they are running (beta, trial, ...). After some digging and searching for the correct Google search terms, this turned out to be really simple. There is an extension for that: org.eclipse.ui.splashHandlers

This extension point allows to contribute a splash handler in which you can add custom behavior to the splash screen.
In this extension you have to specify a splashHandler and a splashHandlerProductBinding. In splashHandler you specify the class that implements the custom behaviour. In splashHandlerProductBinding you bind your splashHandler to your RCP application (you could also customize the behaviour of Eclipse's splash screen).

For our product this is:

   <extension point="org.eclipse.ui.splashHandlers">
      <splashHandler
            class="com.sigasi.hdt.ui.SplashHandler"
            id="com.sigasi.hdt.ui.splashHandler">
      </splashHandler>
      <splashHandlerProductBinding
            productId="com.sigasi.hdt.rcp.product"
            splashId="com.sigasi.hdt.ui.splashHandler">
      </splashHandlerProductBinding>
   </extension>

The only thing left to do, is to implement the splashHandler (The quick fix in the Plugin Manifest Editor is a real time saver).

I extended the EclipseSplashHandler (org.eclipse.ui.internal.splash) and just overrided init to superpose a png image in top right corner.

package com.sigasi.hdt.ui;
 
import com.sigasi.hdt.HdtPlugin;
 
import org.eclipse.jface.resource.ImageDescriptor;
import org.eclipse.swt.events.PaintEvent;
import org.eclipse.swt.events.PaintListener;
import org.eclipse.swt.graphics.Image;
import org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Shell;
import org.eclipse.ui.internal.splash.EclipseSplashHandler;
import org.eclipse.ui.plugin.AbstractUIPlugin;
 
@SuppressWarnings("restriction")
public class SplashHandler extends EclipseSplashHandler {
 
	private static final String BETA_PNG = "icons/splash/beta.png";
	private static final int BORDER = 10;
	private Image image;
 
	public SplashHandler() {
		super();
	}
 
	@Override
	public void init(Shell splash) {
		super.init(splash);
 
		//here you could check some condition on which decoration to show
 
		ImageDescriptor descriptor = AbstractUIPlugin.imageDescriptorFromPlugin(HdtPlugin.ID, BETA_PNG);
		if (descriptor != null)
			image = descriptor.createImage();
		if (image !=null) {
			final int xposition = splash.getSize().x - image.getImageData().width - BORDER;
			final int yposition = BORDER;
			getContent().addPaintListener (new PaintListener () {
				public void paintControl (PaintEvent e) {
					e.gc.drawImage (image, xposition, yposition);
				}
			});
		}
	}
 
	@Override
	public void dispose() {
		super.dispose();
		if (image != null)
			image.dispose();
	}
 
}