Honored ContributorHello, now that Altera has removed the simulator within Quartus 10.0 what is left in Quartus to support AHDL? Is there a third party simulator that supports AHDL? I'm a believer that with Quartus 10.0 the days of AHDL are over, am I wrong?
joe
Honored ContributorAHD .. what? Just kidding. I believe you are correct. Philosophically speaking, the days of AHDL ended a long time ago. It was inevitable. Time to break out those VHDL and Verilog books. Sorry.
JakeHonored Contributoryou can keep an install of QII 9.1sp2 around forever to do AHDL functional simulations and should be able to synthesize in newer versions. you could also do a post-map simulation in ModelSim-AE.
your time is really best spent learning another HDL.Honored ContributorHello, thanks for responding to my post. I agree it it time to pick up another HDL. I played around with 10.0 a little, why is the AHDL option still available when running the MegaWizard?
joeHonored ContributorYou can imagine that transitioning away from a language is difficult for Altera to do. Imagine what the uproar would be if Altera just suddenly dropped synthesis support for the language. At this point, users can still upgrade their existing AHDL designs to 10.0; they just can't simulate them easily. This should begin to nudge people in the direction of picking an industry standard HDL language. The day may come when AHDL support is dropped entirely.
AHDL filled an important gap for Altera during those years where industry and public support for VHDL and Verilog was maturing. The world no longer needs the language. JakeHonored ContributorAHDL has been intensively used in Altera low level IP, I guess, they are not motivated to rewrite all this stuff now, so it will stay with Quartus 10.0. But without functional simulator support.
Honored ContributorIf you check the DB directory on a project, when it discovers/infers a primitive from higher level HDL code, it still pulls in the AHDL version of that primitive.
I doubt they will ever fully drop AHDL supprt. It is neat as a netlist language, but with larger and larger designs netlists become less and less practical.
