HDL and the EE board

Question

Question... Where to draw the line with regards to HDL on EE.SE? This is akin to Arduino questions that appear on EE.SE where most are migrated but some aren't.

VHDL & Verilog are used to describe logic that could target hardware (be it ASIC, FPGA etc...) but they are in essence a programming language. Thing is ... writing in VHDL/Verilog has both hardware & software considerations.

• SOFTWARE: how to describe a certain logical sequences
• HARDWARE: synthesis querks (Actel & if/elsif… tree’s), mapping onto an LUT, timing etc..

When you compare StackOverflow (SO.SE) there are 2743 VHDL tags & 2,390 verilog tags. When the same tags are compared on ElectricalEngineering (EE.SE) there are 668 VHDL & 601 verilog thus SO.SE is geared towards accepting VHDL/Verilog coding queries.

Not all of the EE.SO questions that are tagged VHDL or VERILOG are valid EE.SO queries. Take How to convert a floating point number to integer, using VHDL? shouldn’t this have been migrated to SO.SE

Answer 1

HDL is on-topic on electronics.stackexchange.com. There is no line.

StackExchange can do what it wants with HDL questions, but there is no need to have a "line" that strictly sorts where a question goes. This is a case where there is some overlap between sites, and this is OK. You could ask that question here, or there, (but not both please) and both communities would give you a good answer.

Finally, StackOverflow is huge compared to our site, about 100x bigger (numbers). It doesn't make sense to compare the absolute values of numbers in many cases. How about comparing ratios or percentages?

Tag              | EE.SE  (out of 54k)        | StackOverflow (out of 11M)
verilog*         | 1.25% (673)                | 0.030% (3278)
vhdl*            | 1.24% (670)                | 0.025% (2743)
arduino*/hdl*    | 2.94  (3946/1343)          | 1.37   (8232/6021)

From these numbers, we clearly need more HDL questions to improve our arduino/hdl ratio. (joke)

On a more serious note, while SO is 100x bigger than our site, by population we do 100x more HDL questions.

Answer 2

Your perceptions seem to be somewhat skewed by the organization in which you're working. In the projects in which I've been involved, it's the hardware guys that are writing the HDL and the firmware guys that are writing the microprocessor code — sometimes for microprocessors that are embedded inside the FPGAs.

And I disagree that an HDL is "in essence a programming language." HDLs describe hardware, which is fundamentally parallel, while conventional programming languages are fundamentally sequential. It takes very different mindsets to do a good job in both.