First of all, get Eclipse itself. Go to http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/ and get the “Eclipse IDE for C/C++ Developers” package or install it from your distribution’s package manager. All the following steps were tested with Eclipse Kepler (4.3).

Now start Eclipse and first go to Help $\to$ Check for Updates. Install all available updates.

For Verilog syntax highlighting we use a plugin called “VEditor”. Go to Help $\to$ Install New Software… In the field Work with enter the URL of the installation site, http://veditor.sourceforge.net/update. Now press the return key and after a couple of seconds, the entry VEditor Plugin appears below. Select it and click on the Next button until the installation is finished. To complete the process you need to restart Eclipse.

Every project has different preferences regarding the styling of the code. Therefore every editor can be configured to some extend. First, we’ll set the general settings for Eclipse, and then for Verilog and C.

Start by clicking on Window $\to$ Preferences inside Eclipse. There, choose Editors $\to$ Text Editors. You should set the following settings:

• Check Insert spaces for tabs

• Check Show print margin

• Set the Print margin column to 80

• Check Show line numbers

Just leave the other settings as they are, or change them to your liking.

For the Verilog settings, go to Verilog/VHDL Editor $\to$ Code Style. There, select Space as Indent Character and set the Indent Size to 3.

For the C style used in liboptimsochost and other libraries we have prepared a settings file. Go to C/C++ $\to$ Code Style $\to$ Formatter and click on Import…, choose the settings file doc/resources/optimsoc-eclipse-cdt-codestyle.xml inside the OpTiMSoC source tree. Now you should have a new profile “OpTiMSoC” in the list of profiles. Choose this one for all work on the C code.

Now that all the basic settings are in place, we can create the projects inside Eclipse. First, we will create a project for editing the HDL (Verilog) code.

In the Project Explorer (on the left side), right click and select New $\to$ Project…. A new dialog window shows. In this window, select Verilog/VHDL $\to$ Verilog/VHDL project and click Next. Now enter a project name, e.g. “OpTiMSoC”. Uncheck the option Use default location and click on Browse to choose your OpTiMSoC source directory (the location where you cloned the Git repository to).

The OpTiMSoC source tree not only contains RTL code, but also the necessary software components like liboptimsochost and the OpTiMSoC GUI. This code is better edited in a separate project and should be excluded from the project you just created. To do that, choose Project $\to$ Properties from the main menu. Navigate to Resource $\to$ Resource Filters and click on the Add… button. There, choose the following settings:

• Choose Exclude all in the group Filter type

• Choose Folders in the group Applies to

• Check All children (recursive)

• In the group File and Folder Attributes select Project Relative Path matches src/sw.

Now click on OK to finish editing the filter.

Then repeat the steps above to create a new resource filter but as path use src/sysc this time.

After you’re done with the second filter, click OK again to close the dialog.

Eclipse is also a great choice for editing C code. As an example, we’ll setup Eclipse for the OpTiMSoC host library, liboptimsochost.

In the main menu, click on File $\to$ New $\to$ Project. A dialog window is shown. There, nagivate to C/C++ $\to$ Makefile Project with Existing Code and click on the Next button. Type liboptimsochost as Project Name and click on Browse… to select the source code location of the library. It should be inside your OpTiMSoC code in the folder src/sw/host/liboptimsochost. Uncheck C++ in the Languages group and select GNU Autotools Toolchain in the box below. Now click on Finish to close the dialog.

Before you start coding, double-check if the code style settings are correct. Select the newly created liboptimsochost project from the Project Navigator on the left, right-click and choose Properties. Nagivate to C/C++ General $\to$ Formatter and check if OpTiMSoC is selected as style. If not, click on Enable project specific settings and choose OpTiMSoC from the list. (If there is no such entry, go back to the basic Eclipse setup and import the style file properly.)

You can use the Eclipse GUI to build and run liboptimsochost, but this feature is currently not used by any of the developers. Instead, we only use Eclipse for code editing, and build and debug the software using the regular commands on the console.

Even if you use Eclipse, you do not need to switch editors to get the benefits of Verilog-mode; you can run Verilog-mode in batch mode to resolve all the AUTO comments. This will require some manual setup, but afterwards it can be used quite easily.

First, you need to figure out where your verilog-mode.el or verilog-mode.elc file is located. If you want to use the Verilog-mode which is part of your Emacs installation, it is probably located somewhere in /usr/share/emacs, e.g. /usr/share/emacs/24.3/lisp/progmodes/verilog-mode.elc on Ubuntu 14.04. You can run

to search for it. If you found it, write down the path as we’ll need it later. If you installed Verilog-mode from source, just note the path where you put your verilog-mode.el file (e.g. somewhere in your home directory).

In Eclipse, we will setup Verilog-mode as “Builder”. To do so, click in the main menu on Project $\to$ Properties and nagivate to Builders. There, click on the New… button and select Program as configuration type in the shown dialog. After pressing OK, enter “verilog-mode” into the field Name. In the Main tab, write /usr/bin/emacs into the field Location. Leave the field Working Directory empty and enter the following string into the field Arguments:

Replace the path to the verilog-mode.el or verilog-mode.elc file with your own path you found out above.

Now, switch to the tab Refresh, check the box Refresh resources upon completion and select The selected resource. Since we don’t need to change anything in the last two tabs, you can now close the dialog by clicking on the OK button and on OK again to close the project properties dialog.

To test if it all works, navigate to src/rtl/compute_tile_dm/verilog/compute_tile_dm.v and change the word “Outputs” in the comment right at the beginning of the file to something else. Then press CTRL-B (or go to Project $\to$ Build All) and after a couple of seconds, you should see the word “Outputs” restored and some output messages in the Console view at the bottom. Also check if there were no tabs inserted (e.g. at the instantiation of u_core0). If there are tabs then you probably did not setup your ~/.emacs file correctly.