Casex And Casez

Part of the Fundamentals section of Coddy's Verilog journey — lesson 56 of 90.

Sometimes you only care about specific bits in a value, while other bits can be ignored. For example, in a priority encoder, you want to find the first 1 bit regardless of the other bits.

A regular case statement would require you to list every possible combination of the don't-care bits — which is impossible for wide buses.

casez and casex solve this problem by allowing you to mark certain bits as "don't care" using ?, z, or x.

Casez vs Casex vs Regular Case

Statement	Don't-Care Bits	Best For
`case`	None	Exact matching
`casez`	`z` or `?`	Priority encoders (recommended)
`casex`	`x`, `z`, or `?`	Avoid (hides bugs)

casez ignores bits that are z or ? (recommended)
casex also ignores x bits — which can hide simulation errors

Always use casez, not casex. casex was created first, but engineers realized it was dangerous because it ignores x values (which often indicate uninitialized registers or simulation errors). casez was introduced as a safer alternative.

Example

casez (data)
  4'b???1: out = 0;   // Bit0 must be 1, others don't matter
  4'b??1?: out = 1;   // Bit1 must be 1, others don't matter
  4'b?1??: out = 2;   // Bit2 must be 1, others don't matter
  4'b1???: out = 3;   // Bit3 must be 1, others don't matter
endcase

The ? means "don't care" — that bit can be 0, 1, or anything.

Challenge

What to do:

Add the missing casez statement to make this decoder work.

How it works:

input = 4'b???1 → out = 4'b0001
input = 4'b??1? → out = 4'b0010
input = 4'b?1?? → out = 4'b0100
input = 4'b1??? → out = 4'b1000
Default → out = 4'b0000

Cheat sheet

casez allows pattern matching with don't-care bits using ? or z, useful for priority encoders where only specific bits matter.

Statement	Don't-Care Bits	Notes
`case`	None	Exact matching
`casez`	`z` or `?`	Recommended
`casex`	`x`, `z`, or `?`	Avoid — hides bugs

Always prefer casez over casex. casex ignores x values, which can mask uninitialized registers or simulation errors.

casez (data)
  4'b???1: out = 0;   // Bit0 must be 1, others don't matter
  4'b??1?: out = 1;   // Bit1 must be 1, others don't matter
  4'b?1??: out = 2;   // Bit2 must be 1, others don't matter
  4'b1???: out = 3;   // Bit3 must be 1, others don't matter
  default: out = 0;
endcase

The ? means "don't care" — that bit can be 0, 1, or anything.

Try it yourself

module decoder (
  input [3:0] in,
  output reg [3:0] out
);
  
  always @(*) begin
    // TODO: Add casez statement
    // in = 4'b???1 -> out = 4'b0001
    // in = 4'b??1? -> out = 4'b0010
    // in = 4'b?1?? -> out = 4'b0100
    // in = 4'b1??? -> out = 4'b1000
    // default -> out = 4'b0000
  end
  
endmodule