Here's a question about a good general structure for RTL-projects with multiple target boards and maybe even support for multiple vendors. Are there any good examples in opencores.org today?

I'm looking into building up a file structure for the new scratch ddr-controller which permits separating and sharing files between several synthesis projects. For now everything is working fine, I can build both the 500E and 1600E projects from the same physical disk files by using relative paths in the ISE 11.2 XISE-files. Having this structure will probably demand text-editing the XISE-file (XML-file = simple) each time someone add files but I think it's worth it.

For now it looks like this locally:
-[trunk]
scratch.vhd
... and all other files as before...
-[boards]
-[Microblaze1600E]
Microblaze1600E.xise
Microblaze1600E.ucf
-[StarterKit500E]
StarterKit500E.xise
StarterKit500E.ucf

Is there a OpenCores-standard for laying out the directory structure? Then this should probably be followed instead.

By looking at for example MilkyMist at:
http://github.com/lekernel/milkymist

they use a deeper structure with all reusable cores under /cores/.../ and under their respective names. They also use a /boards/.../ directory in where they also separate synthesis files and board-specific rtl. One step further would be to support several versions of the environments (10.1, 11.x) and of course also have support of several vendors (/xilinx/ /altera/ /lattice/ ) but I think this will have to wait until/if other people joins.

I kind of like the shallow one I describe above to start with! It can be reworked later if there are more interested parties.

Hi

OpenCores has announced some coding guidelines in the last news letter.

Hope this might be helpful to you.

http://www.opencores.org/newsletter,2009,09,#n1

Regards,
Chinthaka

Sorry for not seeing this info before! But thank you for pointing it out! This will be the structure of anything I commit to OpenCores.

Best Regards
Magnus