Lightweight VHDL simulator on Windows

Question

I tried Vivado and Quartus, but both of them are quite heavy, and the tools are very difficult for a starter. Is there an easy free IDE + simulator for a starter that is learning VHDL?

Answer 1

For simulation, ModelSim-Altera Starter Edition is a free version of ModelSim provided by Altera and is very user friendly and widely used. It has a built-in VHDL color-coded editor, so you can edit, compile and model in ModelSim.

Vivado (Xilinx) and Quartus (Altera) are synthesis tools that can convert your VHDL design files to a hardware view that can be downloaded to FPGA. These synthesis tools are used for stage 2 after the structure has been created and modeled to verify proper operation.

Answer 2

VHDL modeling:

There are ports of Linux-programs GHDL and GTKwave for windows:

• http://sourceforge.net/projects/ghdl-updates/files/Builds/ghdl-0.31/Windows/
• http://gtkwave.sourceforge.net/
• http://gtkwave.sourceforge.net/gtkwave.pdf

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(Quartus) ModelSim/QuestaSim . Xilinx iSim ( ISE) xSim ( Vivado) . ghdl , () VHDL.

VHDL-:

, Visual Studio, SharDevelop, MonoDevelop, Eclipse NetBeans, , HDL - !

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Sigasi Eclipse ( ) . . , , ISE:)

Aldec, Mentor,...

Answer 3

VHDL , . .

.: http://www.sigasi.com/faq/which-free-vhdl-simulator-can-i-use

Answer 4

If you are a student, you can get a free student license for Sigasi. This is an eclipse-based vhdl development environment with all the modern IDE features such as error checking on the fly, formatting, freezes ...

It has integration with Modelsim, ISim and riviera, Sigasi compiles vhdl files for you in the background, and you can run the simulator with 1 click. This is not a 100% IDE experience, but it is as close to VHDL as possible.