It had been a long cherished desire to see the development of opensource community in the VLSI industry. Though companies prefer to have paid tools because of their apparent reliability, many small start-ups never take-off because of the humongous cost of tools. The tools are costly because there is a huge amount of engineering R&D effort that lies behind the convenient user interface. Nevertheless a parallel opensource movement in the semiconductor community would definitely accelerate the technological development in the ASIC area.
The 2013 reports show that the current semiconductor industry revenues total upto $315 billions. Out of that the EDA industry had revenues of approximately 1.72 billions, which is about 0.5% of the entire semiconductor industry revenues. Which effectively explains how the value addition takes place further in the product lifecycle from raw RTL code to finished products. We as verification engineers live in the domain of RTL code and hence our jobs is to do quality verification with the tools available. However tools are not available that easily, they are expensive and smaller companies can afford only limited licenses. Having said that, the EDA industry acts as a key enabler in creating bug-free ASIC.
Within the given framework, ASIC development has to progress for new technologies to be proven fast. Hence a parallel opensource EDA development is not a bad idea. Actually it is a great idea.
What are the current free tools available :-
The 2013 reports show that the current semiconductor industry revenues total upto $315 billions. Out of that the EDA industry had revenues of approximately 1.72 billions, which is about 0.5% of the entire semiconductor industry revenues. Which effectively explains how the value addition takes place further in the product lifecycle from raw RTL code to finished products. We as verification engineers live in the domain of RTL code and hence our jobs is to do quality verification with the tools available. However tools are not available that easily, they are expensive and smaller companies can afford only limited licenses. Having said that, the EDA industry acts as a key enabler in creating bug-free ASIC.
Within the given framework, ASIC development has to progress for new technologies to be proven fast. Hence a parallel opensource EDA development is not a bad idea. Actually it is a great idea.
What are the current free tools available :-
- Fedora Electronics Lab - This is a high-end design and simulation platform with opensource EDA software
- EDA playground - http://www.edaplayground.com - You can type your code and simulate here
- http://dungspreader.blogspot.in/2013_03_01_archive.html - Some great ideas on opensource in verification
- http://www.semiwiki.com/forum/showwiki.php?title=Semi+Wiki:EDA+Open+Source+Tools+Wiki
- http://sourceforge.net/projects/veriwell/
- iverilog.icarus.com/
- http://sourceforge.net/projects/pvsim/
- http://www.veripool.org/wiki/verilator
- http://ghdl.free.fr/
- http://opencores.org/opencores,tools
- http://verilog.comuf.com/free.html
- iverilog.com/
- http://sourceforge.net/projects/gplcver/
- http://www.syncad.com/
- http://opencircuitdesign.com/verilog/
- http://www.myhdl.org/doku.php
- http://rhdl.rubyforge.org/
- http://www.sugawara-systems.com/
- http://verilog.openhpsdr.org/
- http://6004.csail.mit.edu/6.371/cadtools/gtkwave/wave.html
- http://gtkwave.sourceforge.net/
- https://cocotb.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html
- https://github.com/potentialventures/cocotb
- http://www.gpleda.org
- http://jeffrey.co.in/blog/2014/01/installing-migen
Icarus are in the process of adding SystemVerilog features. Since they're making substantial progress it would be good if more of the community supported that effort.
ReplyDeleteAlso don't forget the new kid on the block Cocotb - an open source python verification methodology:
https://github.com/potentialventures/cocotb
https://cocotb.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
It's available on EDA Playground
Thanks for the info. Added Cocotb in the list. We can definitely build a community for supporting Icarus.
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