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Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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8 years ago

QuestaSim license usable in for ModelSim-altera

Hi folks,

tl;dr: Could you use a QuestaSim license for ModelSim(-altera)?

My university has a QuestaSim license and a Quartus license. To simulate my Qsys system (containing both vhdl and verilog files), I would like to use the Quartus Prime Standard Edition. Installing seems to work fine, and licensing also. However when starting a simulation via Quartus (Tools -> Run simulation tools -> RTL Simulation), nothing appears. It seems that (after starting modelsim via the console) modelsim cannot find a license, although the "LM_LICENSE_FILE"-environment variable is to the QuestaSim license. Therefore we suspect that QuestaSim licenses do not work on ModelSim (although they, more or less, use the same backend). Does anyone know if this is the case?

P.s: I would like to use ModelSim because there seems not to be a default QuestaSim download location (so that I should ask my professor to download it) and it would be more work to setup all the Altera libraries for QuestaSim.

6 Replies

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    8 years ago

    AFAIK, modelsim altera is licensed from altera, whereas questa is from mentor. So you cannot use the questa licence for your copy of modelsim altera.

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    8 years ago

    Ok, thanks :) The answer I did not hoped for, but expected anyhow.

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    8 years ago

    The simulation doesn't work in the free edition. I think is due to I am doing a co-simulation (simulations with both verilog and vhdl). My professor told me that that in the past was not possible with the free edition. I got an error which was related to "param"-something or "parameter"-something (I don't recall the exact naming). It doesn't show up in the licensed questasim version.

    Exporting the Altera libraries to Questasim was actually quite easy. Note that I am using linux (Ubuntu). In the modelsim "toplevel" directory (in the default case, the ~/intelFPGA/17.1/modelsim or ~/intelFPGA_lite/17.1/modelsim directory), you can find a folder called "Altera". Just copy this one to the "toplevel" directory of questasim (I don't know the default directory, but I unpacked questasim in "~/intelFPGA/17.1/V10.6C") and it worked flawlessly (after including the right libraries in the simulation command/simulation configuration window).
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    8 years ago

    Multi-language simulation has been supported in the starter edition of modelsim since the version shipped with Quartus 15.0.