hi ... I have a question for the experts , I am doing a post mortem of my last project , it was a communication processor that was basicly a lot of dataflow paths controlled by several rather complex state machines ( 100-200 states ) , I did the design by thinking out the control and drawing the state diagrams and then coding them into VHDL for Quartus and into a Stratix .. it worked , after handing over the design to the test department they loaded a board and signed off on the design within a week. My fellow engineers were rather impressed since they knew how complex the control was.
The downside here was the state machines became complex and took quite a while to figure out ... then transcibing them into VHDL and also drawing a pretty state chart for documenting the design took a while. Yes I know some say start right with typing VHDL but I find that hard to comceptualize. Since this is a small company big $$ tools are out of the question.
So my question ... are there tools out there that can make this process faster ? like drawing the state charts on the screen and outputing VHDL ? or other suggestions ??? again if these are $5-10K tools I won't be getting them in this company so shareware or