Synopsis

NVC is a VHDL compiler and simulator.

NVC is currently under active development but VHDL-2002 support is largely complete and it has been successfully used to simulate several real-world designs.

NVC has a particular emphasis on simulation performance and uses LLVM to compile VHDL to native machine code.

NVC is not a synthesizer. That is, it does not output something that could be used to program an FPGA or ASIC. It implements only the simulation behaviour of the language as described by the IEEE 1076 standard.

Usage

Simulating a VHDL hardware design involves three steps: analysing the source files; elaborating the design; and running the simulation. This is analogous to compiling, linking, and executing a software program. With NVC these steps are accomplished using the -a, -e, and -r commands:

$ nvc -a my_design.vhd my_tb.vhd
$ nvc -e my_tb
$ nvc -r my_tb

Or more succinctly, as a single command:

$ nvc -a my_design.vhd my_tb.vhd -e my_tb -r

Where my_tb is the name of the top-level test-bench entity.

The full manual can be read after installation using man nvc or online.

License

This program is free software distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3 or later. You may use, modify, and redistribute the program as you wish but if you distribute modifications you must preserve the license text and copyright notices, and also make the modified source code available to your users.

The source files for the IEEE standard libraries are included in the repository. These were originally provided under a proprietary license that forbid distribution of modifications, but in 2019 were relicensed under Apache 2.0. Freely redistributable versions of the 1993 libraries were made by editing and removing declarations from the 2019 libraries, and so are also licensed under Apache 2.0.

The VITAL libraries are distributed under lib/vital. These were derived from draft copies of the packages freely available on the internet. The license status of these is unclear as the final text is part of the VITAL standard which must be purchased from the IEEE.

Installing

NVC is developed under GNU/Linux and is regularly tested on macOS and Windows under MSYS2.

On macOS NVC can be installed with brew install nvc. NVC is also packaged for FreeBSD, GNU Guix, and Arch Linux AUR. Users of other systems should build from source.

NVC has both a release branch and a development master branch. The master branch should be stable enough for day-to-day use and has comprehensive regression tests, but the release branch is more suitable for third party packaging. The latest released version is 1.5.1. Significant changes since the last release are detailed in HISTORY.md.

To build from a Git clone:

./autogen.sh
mkdir build && cd build
../configure
make
sudo make install

Generating the configure script requires autoconf 2.63 and automake 1.11 or later.

To build from a released tarball:

./configure
make
sudo make install

To use a specific version of LLVM add --with-llvm=/path/to/llvm-config to the configure command. The minimum supported LLVM version is 7.0. Versions 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 have all been tested.

On Linux the libdw or libdwarf libraries can be used to generate more accurate VHDL stack traces if installed.

NVC also depends on Flex to generate the lexical analyser.

On a Debian derivative the following should be sufficient to install all required dependencies:

sudo apt-get install build-essential automake autoconf \
  flex check llvm-dev pkg-config zlib1g-dev libdw-dev

Only the MSYS2 environment on Windows is supported. The required dependencies can be installed with:

pacman -S base-devel mingw-w64-x86_64-{llvm,ncurses,libffi,check,pkg-config}

GtkWave can be used to view simulation waveforms. Version 3.3.79 or later is required for the default FST format.

Testing

To run the regression tests:

make check

The unit tests require the check library.

Reporting bugs

Report bugs to [email protected] or using the GitHub issue tracker. Please include enough information to reproduce the problem, ideally with a small VHDL test case. Issue #412 is a good example.

Please remember that this software is provided to you with NO WARRANTY and no expectation of support, but I will do my best to help with any issues you encounter.

Contributing

This project does not generally accept code contributions, except for small bug fixes as described below, and I am not looking for additional regular contributors. NVC is primarily a hobby project which I work on in my spare time for relaxation and enjoyment. Reviewing patches and managing a community of contributors requires a significant amount of time and can be both mentally and emotionally exhausting. This is not something I am prepared to do outside of my day job. That said I do welcome contributions of the following kind:

• Build fixes. For example to support a new version of a library or new compiler warnings.
• Portability fixes. For example to support a new Linux distribution or BSD variant. I am particularly open to patches that simplify downstream packaging.
• Documentation fixes.
• Trivial bug fixes. Please include a test case which demonstrates the problem.

Patches can be sent with either git --send-email or as a pull request on GitHub.

The best way you can contribute to NVC is by using it for your work or hobby project and reporting any bugs or issues you find. I am particularly interested in performance comparisons with commercial simulators or any general usability issues you encounter. Even just a quick note to say you used it on some project and what your experience was is very motivational.

Language Support

VHDL standard revisions are commonly referred to by the year they were published. For example IEEE 1076-2008 is known as VHDL-2008. The default standard in NVC is VHDL-93 as this remains the most widely used in the industry. The default can be changed with the --std argument. For example --std=2008 selects the VHDL-2008 standard.

VHDL-1987

Not supported. Although it is trivial to replace legacy constructs with VHDL-1993 equivalents.

VHDL-1993

Mostly supported with a few exceptions:

• Configurations have several bugs and are missing features.
• No support for buffer ports.
• No guard expressions on blocks.
• bus and register signal kinds are not supported.
• Limited support for conversions in port maps.

Please raise bugs for any missing or incorrectly implemented features you encounter.

VHDL-2000

This revision added protected types which are fully supported.

VHDL-2002

The only significant change in VHDL-2002 was to the behaviour of buffer ports which are currently not implemented.

VHDL-2008

VHDL-2008 was a large change to the standard with many new features. Support for these is currently in development. Notable omissions include:

• Enhanced generics on packages and subprograms are not supported.
• PSL is not supported.
• Hierarchical references are not supported.
• Force / release is not supported.
• case? statement with "don't care" is not supported.

VHDL-2019

The most recent revision of the standard also added many new features. None of these are supported with the exception of conditional compilation directives.

VHPI

The VHDL standard contains a comprehensive API called VHPI for interfacing with foreign code written in C or another language. There is very limited support for this which can be enabled with the --enable-vhpi option when configuring. Refer to the manual for more information.

Vendor Libraries

NVC provides scripts to compile the simulation libraries of common FPGA vendors.

• For Xilinx ISE use ./tools/build-xilinx-ise.rb
• For Xilinx Vivado use ./tools/build-xilinx-vivado.rb
• For Altera Quartus use ./tools/build-altera.rb
• For Lattice iCEcube2 use ./tools/build-lattice.rb

The libraries will be installed under ~/.nvc/lib.