RTL Linting: Proceed with Confidence

By Sergei Zaychenko, Aldec Software Product Manager

It is typically performed on the synthesisable Register Transfer Level (RTL) subset of the HDL, be it VHDL or Verilog/SystemVerilog, though it can also be partially applied at the gate level too.

Why lint? Because simulation and synthesis can take a long time, particularly for large gate-count devices, it is worth going into both with the cleanest code possible; thus minimising the risk of having to trace problems back to HDL. Or to put it another way, linting is about securing design quality assurance early on in the design flow.

Linting performs a static analysis of the code, checking it against recognized design rules and best-practice guidelines. It also helps identify problems such as unreachable statements, suboptimal synthesis, simulation versus synthesis mismatches, clock/reset connectivity issues, unsynchronized Clock Domain Crossings (CDCs) as well as looking for obstacles against testability, all of which help reduce the number of synthesis and implementation re-runs.

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