Professional VHDL IDE? [closed]

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Is there a good IDE to work with VHDL projects ? Or are most of the professionals working with emacs/vim/notepad++ ?

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I use Emacs+VHDL-mode which is great if you don't mind (or have already climbed) the learning curve of Emacs.

Alternatively, you could try Sigasi-HDT which is Eclipse-based and has more GUI. And some more powerful refactoring tools by the look of it.

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I have been using Sigasi HDT since it was released in january (I think) and am very pleased with it so far. Previously I used Vim for all my editing (C or VHDL), but since I switched to Sigasi I have not looked back. The Eclipse based plugin is much more than just syntax highlighting. The auto-completion of components and entities is a real time-saver and you avoid a lot of errors. You can download a free trial from their website (http://www.sigasi.com) and I encourage you to give it a try with grlib (http://www.gaisler.com) to see the real power of the plugin.

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Maybe Xilinx ISE or Altera Quartus.

I once tried - at least I wanted to try - Altera Quartus, but I soon switched to a normal editor and took GHDL for simulation.

But I am no professional, so I suppose they are using some of the former two products.

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Engineers in large semiconductor companies are using emacs/vim for code editing. Integrated Development Environment doesn't make much sense there, since a project is a few thousand HDL files taken from different places on a *NIX network, setup scripts for a dozen different tools, and cron jobs to do frequent builds.

For simpler FPGA projects developed on Windows I've seen people using Borland CodeWright, UltraEdit, and Crimson Editor.

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I've been using Notepad++ along with the free vendor tools to edit my VHDL on Windows.

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My best bet is to use VIM to do whatever i need to for VHDL formatting. VIM has an extremely powerful facility to develop custom plugins, and no amount of IDE hopping will give you all the customization you would ever need.

Things like signal names < 20 characters, procedure lengths < 100 lines, no use of linkage ports -- all of these can be coded in VIM with minimal effort. You could actually run vcom or ncvhdl from within VIM and then see where the errors are.

Having said all this, you might want to take a look at what Sigasi has to offer. If you need more help on this, let me know -- it'd be fun coding a VIM plugin.

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Emacs + VHDL mode + a compiler / simulator + source control.

The VHDL mode is configured to use the compiler to compile the design and optionally run the simulation.

Emacs can link with the source control to correctly check in, diff and tag.

I personally like this set up because the editor is open source and I can use it anywhere (Mac, Linux, Windows). The compiler / simulator can be anything from a free download (FPGA vendor sponsored Modelsim or GHDL) to a grid engine. Once set up, it pretty much becomes invisible.

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Simplifide also has an eclipse plugin which supports VHDL, Verilog and SystemVerilog which contains all of the standard IDE features and more.

It can be downloaded at http://simplifide.com

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I'm just using Scite, like for most other coding.

Some things in Scite make my VHDL coding pleasant:

1. Coloring is easy to set up. Either download a ready .properties file or modify the Ada mode.
2. Scite has a snippets plugin that's very useful for VHDL. All those boring process and architecture definitions are generated automatically for me with a couple of key-presses.
3. Scite is easy to customize with external scripts: I have scripts for compiling the current file, for fixing indentation, for listing all processes and so on, the possibilities are limitless.

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Besides the big ones Sigasi and Simplifide there is also ZamiaCad a free VHDL IDE: http://zamiacad.sourceforge.net/web/

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It depends on the kind of project you are developing. Modelsim provides a good IDE but the code editor lacks the advanced features we are accustomed to use. I use VIM to write the code, and Modelsim to simulate, debug etc...

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There's another VHDL-IDE, it's a plug-in for Visual Studio, but as far as I could see, it is also available as standalone version (ie, you don't need a Visual Studio license). It seems relatively new, but so far I really like it.

http://www.vide-software.at

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I switched to use Vim because it has a very large list of plugins for almost any language (I believe Emacs do also). You might not get the best VHDL IDE ever with it, but you get a familiar interface for every code and non-code you must edit. Plus, as you move between companies, you can take your environment with you.

For the ones using Vim, check vim-hdl. It's a plugin I'm working on that provides syntax checking based on simulators/compilers. I'm using daily with ModelSim and so far works nice.

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Emacs with the appropriate language mode is my vote. Basic editing is easy enough to learn and there are a lot of example config files out there. Kevin.

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I'm using Xilinx ISE for educational purposes, it works really well. And it has everything. After applying for a student license, the student version it free to use, but it takes up a lot of space. The installation file alone is more than 6 gb. The book we use for school is referring to xilinx special properties. (“FGPA Prototyping by VHDL Examples”). I'm also programming on a nexsys 3 spartan 6 testboard, and I'll be using xilinx for another year, but when I finish the course I’m gonna look for something smaller. Happy to read about the lightweight alternatives.