Lightweight VHDL simulator in Windows

Question

I tried Vivado and Quartus, but both of them are quite heavy, and the tools are very complicated for a starter. Is there a lightweight free IDE + Simulator for a starter who is learning VHDL?

Answer 1

VHDL-Simulation:

There are ports of the linux programs GHDL and GTKwave for windows:

• https://github.com/ghdl/ghdl/releases
• http://gtkwave.sourceforge.net/
• http://gtkwave.sourceforge.net/gtkwave.pdf

GHDL is a command line tool to compile VHDL files and "simulate" them. the output is a waveform file, which can be viewed/inspected by gtkwave. You can write some scripts (I would advice PowerShell) to automate the compilation or you can use a build tool.

In my opinion (Quartus) ModelSim / QuestaSim is not lightweight. The Xilinx simulators iSim (included in ISE) and xSim (included in Vivado) are good enough for every day simulations. ghdl is very fast, but does not support all (advanced) VHDL features.

VHDL-IDEs:

If you are familiar with state-of-the art coding environments like Visual Studio, SharDevelop, MonoDevelop, Eclipse or NetBeans then I would say coding HDLs is still in the stone-age !!

All big vendors offer free HDL toolchains, which are paided by the devices, but these tools are only multi-tabbed text editors with a design hierarchy viewer and some buttons to hide the command line tool executions.

The mentioned Sigasi Eclipse plugin (there is also e free version) is new on the market and has some advantages. This plugin is under constant development and still increasing in its features. I tested several versions in the past, but I'm not satisfied with some features so I'm still using ISE :)

As a students I have not the chance to try some professional tools from Aldec, Mentor, ...

Answer 2

For simulation, ModelSim-Altera Starter Edition is a free version of ModelSim provided by Altera, and is very user friendly and widely used. It has a build in editor with VHDL color coding, so you can do editing, compile, and simulation from within ModelSim.

Vivado (Xilinx) and Quartus (Altera) are synthesis tools, which can transform your VHDL design files into a hardware representation that can be downloaded into an FPGA. These synthesis tools are used for step two, after a design has been created and simulated to verify proper operation.