How to Import 100 Registers from a Text File to airhdl

One of our users recently asked how he could import a list of 100 registers into airhdl without having to create every single register by hand in the user interface. He had the names of the registers available in a text file, one name per line:

REG_0
REG_1
REG_2
…
REG_99

Subscribers to the airhdl Professional CL plan can import register maps into airhdl by uploading a JSON file whose structure is described in the documentation.

To help import the user’s registers into airhdl, we have created a small Python script that transforms the user’s text file into an airhdl register map JSON object. The script, which is called regs2json.py, is available on our GitHub page. It can be used as follows:

python regs2user.py registers.txt map_name

Where registers.txt is the path to the text file containing the register names and map_name is the name of the register map to be created. The script generates an output file called out.json in the current working directory, which looks like this:

{
  "jsonVersion": 2,
  "registerMap": {
    "name": "my_map",
    "description": "",
    "width": 32,
    "baseAddress": 0,
    "addrWidthBits": 32,
    "revision": 1,
    "generateRecordPorts": false,
    "registers": [
      {
        "type": "Register",
        "name": "REG_0",
        "description": "",
        "access": "READ_WRITE",
        "addressOffset": 0,
        "size": 32,
        "fields": [
          {
            "name": "value",
            "description": "",
            "bitWidth": 32,
            "bitOffset": 0,
            "reset": 0,
            "selfClear": false
          }
        ]
      },
      ...
    ]
  }
}

The last step is to upload the generated out.json file to the airhdl web application using the Upload button in the Register Maps view:

This creates a new register map with the name that we have specified when executing the regs2json.py script (in this example, my_map):

The out.json file can also be used as an input to the airhdl command line generator, which can generate all the airhdl output products (VHDL and SystemVerilog RTL code, testbenches, C header and documentation) locally on the user’s machine:

java -jar airhdl-cl.jar out.json

As we have seen, all it takes is a few lines of Python code to turn a text file into an airhdl register map JSON object that can be either uploaded to the airhdl web application to create a new register map, or used locally as an input to the airhdl command line generator.