VUnit - The Best Value for Initial Effort - Part 2#

Note

This article was originally posted on LinkedIn where you may find some comments on its contents.

Best Value Part 2

In the previous blog I showed how VUnit can be installed in less than one minute. This was the first step towards my goal of showing that

For VHDL, VUnit gives the best value for initial effort

The first step was certainly almost effortless but to be honest it didn’t provide any value whatsoever. Time to change that by spending another minute.

In my second video clip I will show how you can create a compile script for your project within a minute. This script provides incremental compilation, meaning that it will find your source files, figure out their dependencies to create a compile order, and then compile what’s needed based on what has changed since last compilation. Once you created such a script you rarely change it, files can normally be added and removed without modifications.

Another minute of work but this time some real added value. The only requirement is that you are using one of the supported simulators, currently ModelSim/Questa, Riviera-Pro, Active-HDL, GHDL, and Cadence Incisive. Support for other simulators is planned.

In my next blog I will use the same script to also run all the testbenches in my project and present a test report. Until then you can have a more detailed look at the script created by downloading the example project.

Comments and questions are encouraged. You can do it here on LinkedIn but even better is to use our user community chat room.