Apologies for the (slightly) commercial nature of this post.
Those of you with long memories may recall coding devices in ABEL. One nice thing about ABEL was that you could write very simple vector files to simulate your device, where a vector was something like
[C,1,0,1,etc] -> [1,1,0,1,HHHH,01AB,etc]ie. setup some inputs, apply a clock pulse, and check some outputs. I've written some software over the years that lets me do the same thing in VHDL, with various extensions, and I use it to test most of my RTL code. It's simple, you don't need to write or know *any* VHDL to use it, and it gives you a pass/fail very quickly, for a module or a whole device.
I'm thinking about brushing this up a bit, adding Verilog support, and flogging it for maybe 100 - 300 USD a go. To use it, you obviously still need a simulator - the software currently produces VHDL-only output, and uses your simulator to simulate your chip using the auto-generated verification code.
This brings me to my problem. I can make the software a lot more sophisticated if I can generate C code, as well as (or instead of) the VHDL or Verilog. There are some testbenchy things which are just very difficult to do in pure VHDL or Verilog. *But*, most of the potential users of this software will be FPGA coders with a cheap simulator that doesn't support a C-language interface (ModelSim PE/VHDL on Windows, for example, doesn't do this, and presumably the FPGA-specific simulators don't do this either).
What I'd really like to find out, if you can spare the time and this might be of interest to you, is:
- What simulator do you use?
- Is your RTL code in Verilog/VHDL/both?
- Does your simulator have a C-language interface? From Verilog, or VHDL, or both?
- If your simulator doesn't support C, would you be willing to upgrade it to use a product of this sort? Or would you prefer to get pure VHDL or Verilog out of this software, even if it means reduced vector file functionality?
As a bonus, if you add the line "this is a great idea and I claim my
50% discount", then you can have 50% off the (initial) purchase price, if I ever get around to doing this.You can reply here or directly to me at 'unet+50' 'at' 'riverside-machines' 'dot' 'com'.
Thanks -
Evan