The idea of having a power feature for tracking signals throughout a design is almost as old as Sigasi software itself. A recent support question from a customer put this feature request back at the top of our minds.

This is the scenario: you see a signal in a certain component and you wonder who drives it and who reads it. In real life, there are no guarantees that the name of this signal is preserved throughout the design hierarchy. You want to know about all the different names for the signals because you might consider cleaning things up. After all, you do have a nice tool that can do automatic rename refactorings!

So, what should the user interface look like? Triggering the search command will be easy. We'll define a configurable keyboard shortcut, and you'll be able to right-click on the signal and select a search function. The hard part is how to display the search results.
Block Diagram

Which results do you want to see?

• All places where this signal is written and read?
• All declarations of relevant ports and signals?
• All relevant port associations in corresponding instantiations?

How should this be structured? Hierarchically? Per file?

There are some optional commands that might be useful. On the other hand, they might clutter up the user interface:

• Find drivers
• Find loads (what is the correct name here?)
• Rename across hierarchy

Let us know what you think: would you give a high priority to this feature? How should we display the results?

Here are some proposals for the output:
Find Signals per File Find Signals in Hierarchy