Poll: Do you want the internal simulator back?

lfaustini,

By all means, stick with the methods that work for you. What I was trying to point out is that this methodology is disappearing and perhaps you might want to learn some newer methods. You might be the frog in the boiling pot.

I know that you were trying to make a point with your oscilloscope/voltmeter comparison, but it doesn't address the point I was trying to make: that if you have a pay the salaries of an engineering staff to maintain the oscilloscope and the voltmeter, which one is the better investment? Which do you keep if you can only afford one of them? If the overwhelming majority of your customers are using the oscilloscope, then the choice is clear. No matter how useful the voltmeter is, no matter how attached to it you are, it has to go.

Adoption of the Modelsim simulator doesn't have to be so painful, either. If you really have no interest in learning HDL or writing testbenches, you can still just use waveforms. The Modelsim-Altera simulator provides a waveform editor tool that can generate the stimulus for your simulation.

I agree that the "industry" does come up with "stupid ideas that failed", but I hope you're not trying to apply this label to standard HDL simulators, right? This is, by far, the most popular and enduring method for designing both small- and large-scale digital designs for the past 20 years.

I know that it can be frustrating to learn new methods, but I think that you'll find embracing the new tools can be just as quick and efficient as using your old ones -- in time you'll be more efficient. After you write a couple of testbenches, you'll see how quickly you can construct them, and you'll soon have your own small library of simulation tools that you can customize to address all of your verification needs -- large or small.