| ??? 10/01/07 18:59 Read: times |
#145205 - free vs paid-for ModelSim Responding to: ???'s previous message |
Jez Smith said:
Ive just this morning spent 4 grand on a full version of modelsim because I actually managed to convince my boss of the importance of simulations and not relying on the crippled versions of modelsim which altera and xilinx supply for free which complain if you run more than a few thousand lines of code.
We are working on pretty large and complex designs with 1.5 million gates but its still very worth while if you have to spend an engineers costs for a month if you end up with tools which are going to save a lot of problems later on. Indeed. I agree ... if the free tools can handle your designs then great, but once you hit the free tools' size limit, the simulations slow down to nothing and you can't use them. I hit this limit doing back-annotated (post-fit) timing simulations, but I rarely run them anyways. Also it means that we can simulate devices from other manufacturers which is always a good thing. You can certainly simulate Altera code with the Xilinx version of the tools. If you get their models you can include them in your simulations. You do it the same way that you include the models in ModelSim PE or SE. It's just that Xilinx makes it really easy to simulate specific Xilinx stuff. And remember: if your source code doesn't instantiate anything vendor specific, then it doesn't matter which simulation tool you use. -a |
