( ESNUG 377 Item 1 ) -------------------------------------------- [09/19/01]
Subject: ( DAC'01 #13 ) VCS Has Crappy GUI, Docs, & Unfindable Switches
> SAME OLD, SAME OLD: If you take a look at last year's DAC Trip Report,
> you'll find that Cadence NC-Verilog & Synopsys VCS were fighting neck and
> neck; Model Tech were doing really well in the VHDL and Verilog/VHDL
> co-simulation market...
From: "Gregg Lahti" <gregg.lahti@corrent.com>
John,
Is it just me or does it seem to me that VCS has been stuck in a timewarp?
I used VCS a little over four years ago and then wound up using ModelSim
for four years. Over those four years, ModelSim added some very useful
features and improvements plus Verilog support which I happily used. I
changed companies, and I'm now back using VCS.
But it seems that VCS hasn't evolved. VCS did change, as evident of some
speedup performances with the Radiant options and the 2-state simulation
option. But after being away from using it for four years, the VCS
documentation hasn't changed much if at all. Finding out all of the new
switches added or the performance adds to VCS isn't possible: the shipped
docs still have Chronologic plastered all over them and there is a
serious lack of any documentation available on the Solvnet site. (I had
to resort to going through my SNUG handouts of previous years to find out
about the latest and great issues with VCS).
The VCS PLI interface sure hasn't been improved, as it doesn't support
PLI 2.0 calls and still has some limited PLI 1.0 issues. The virsim
interface seems much different than what was in it four years ago.
However, the new interface seems to me more user-hostile than the
VHDL simulator interface that Synopsys finally dumped a year ago. Thank
goodness for Debussy which still offers really good debugging and a
half-way decent user doc.
Finally, it's mid-year 2001. How many more years must I wait for VCS to
integrate all of the Verilog 2000 language updates?
In all fairness, VCS seems pretty speedy. But speed isn't everything
when it's tough to use and hard to debug my problems with. Having been
away from it for four years, I would have expected some improvements and
the ability to reference them. It seems to me that I've jumped through
a timewarp and landed on the Planet of the VCS, where evolution has gone
backwards.
Hopefully I won't accidently discover the Statue of Liberty in any of the
silicon I'm simulating.
- Gregg Lahti
Corrent Corp Tempe, AZ
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