FPGA design from scratch. Part 5 « New Horizons - FPGA design - Wild Skating - Mac

Friday, December 15, 2006

FPGA design from scratch. Part 5

I have decided to use the Cadence Incisive HDL simulator for my functional verification. I will setup my own simulation environment using a tool called Mongoose. Mongoose is a graphical user interface (GUI) program, designed for setting up and running a simulation testbench. It can be used as an interactive tool or used for running regression testing in batch mode.
I started to develop the Mongoose program more than 10 years ago and have been using it in all my ASIC verification work. It can be setup to utilize any Verilog or VHDL simulator and it can also integrate Specman for automatic generation of functional tests. In this chapter I will describe how to setup and use the Cadence Insisive HDL simulator in the Mongoose Simulation Environment. Read more about Mongoose in the Zoo Design Platform presentation.

Setting up the simulation environment

Before starting Mongoose we have create a working directory. The working directory is the directory from where we start all our simulations:
mkdir /home/svenand/root/projects/ETC/verification
We don't want to remember this long file name so we will define an environment variable instead:
setenv ETC_VERIFICATION /home/svenand/root/projects/ETC/verification (csh and tcsh)
Add this statement to your .cshrc file
export ETC_VERIFICATION=/home/svenand/root/projects/ETC/verification (sh and bash)
Add this statement to your .bashrc file
Go to the working directory: cd $ETC_VERIFICATION
and start the Mongoose program: mongoose &

Open the terminal window by clicking the

button.

Next thing to do is to create the file structure needed to support all activities during the simulation phase. Select Create Environment from the Setup menu and fill in the information:

Design name : ETC
Environment Variable Name : ETC_VERIFICATION
Working Directory : $ETC_VERIFICATION
Language : Verilog
Simulator : NC-SIM (Incisive HDL Simulator)
Simulation Setup : Functional
Script File : $ETC_VERIFICATION/CreateEnvironment

Click the Setup Script button to generate and run the environment setup script. When finished click the Mongoose Setup button to save the whole Mongoose setup in the file .mongoose-setup stored in the working directory. The next time you start Mongoose the setup file will be read and your are back to where you were the last time.

Too see what the file structure looks like open the File Tree Browser and click the Set Root button to display the first level of files. Double-click on a directory to see the next level of files.

This table explains the usage of the different directories. This is only a recommendation, you can change almost everything if you like to.

Directory	Description
bookmark	Stores the directory bookmark file
command	Stores saved commands
database	Stores the compiled simulation libraries
debug	Stores debug commands for interactive debugging
design	Stores the verilog or VHDL design files
designDefine	Stores design definition files (behaviour, RTL, netlist)
help	Stores help information
input	Stores TCL input files to the simulator
key	Stores the key file from the simulation
libraryDefine	Stores macro library definition files
log	Stores log files
macrolib	Stores the macro library files
mongoose	Stores all the script files generated from Mongoose
plot	Stores Simvision waveform viewer plot files
result	Stores different result files from the simulation
script	Stores auxilary script files
sdfSetup	Stores sdf setup files
setup	Stores Mongoose setup files
simSetup	Stores simulator setup files (cds.lib, hdl.var)
task	Stores Verilog task files
testbench	Stores Verilog testbench file
testcase	Stores Verilog testcase files

To display the current directories setup open Setup->Environment.

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Posted at 07:42 am by svenand

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