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Altera_Forum
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16 years ago

Comments on Best HDL simulator

Hello, I've been using the simulator built into Quartus to do all my simulations. When Quartus 10.0 is released the simulator will be removed. Below are the following simulators that one could use: ...
Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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16 years ago

I think ActiveHDL and Riviera use the same simulation kernel. I've not used Riviera but I think the differences are mainly to do with features.

Personally I think ActiveHDL is the best simulator that I've used. I hate going back to Modelsim afterwards. ActiveHDL has a really good GUI and project management tools; Modelsim GUI is really flaky and the project files are full of bugs; I'd almost say Modelsim is really a command line tool.

That said there is a free version of Modelsim from Altera (although Lattice give away a free version of ActiveHDL) so if money is an issue then Modelsim is OK - personally I don't like it but at the end of the day it gets the job done.

GHDL is a free open-source simulator which uses GTKWave to view data - it's worth a look - as a command line tool it's great and the language support is as good as if not better than some of the commercial tools.