It is first important to note which tools are available on which machines. The DSIL and DATC cluster machines are Solaris 2 (SunOS 5.3) machines while the workstations such as blackbird, jefferson, and sverige use SunOS 4.1.3. None of the software of interest to us is available on EE (an IBM RS/6000).
Powerview and Synopsys are available on all the Suns, as is the Xilinx software now. You no longer need to log in to jefferson or another SunOS 4.1 machine in order to use Xilinx XACT environment, XDM, xnf2wir, ppr, makebits, etc.
If you run XDM or Design Analyzer on a remote X display you may get an error "Cannot open X display" or "Unable to initialize X" even though all othe X programs work fine. This is due to a bug in the Sun yp/NIS database and is easily fixed. Instead of specifing a machine name in your display variable (e.g. setenv DISPLAY mymachine.dorm.duke.edu:0), use the numeric IP address: setenv DISPLAY 152.3.111.1:0.
Your .cshrc file needs to set certain environment variables and paths in order for the Synopsys and Xilinx tools to work. The departmental scripts found in /opt/digital take care of the details for you. Just add the following lines to your .cshrc file:
setenv CAD_SILENT (optional) source /opt/digital/setup_synopsys source /opt/digital/setup_other_cadYou may also want to add a line such as the following to make starting the Powerview Cockpit easier:
alias powerview 'cd ~/powerview; /opt/digital/bin/powerview'Now you must either log out and back in to make the changes effective, or simply type source .cshrc.
You can check that the setup worked by testing for the presence of a few programs:
which design_analyzer which XDM which xnf2wir
You must now decide where you want your project files to reside. There are many ways to do this, but the simplest is just to create a single directory for all the files in a given design module.
The Powerview tools like to use a Powerview project directory, which differs from any other directory only in the presence of a viewdraw.ini file and three subdirectories: wir/, sch/, and sym/. Go into the Powerview Cockpit and select Project->Create to automatically make these simple additions to your directory.
You are now ready to start writing VHDL code. Viewlogic software expects to find VHDL source code with a .vhd extension, so this is probably a good choice. Other programs may let you use .vhdl or .v, although .v is a common Verilog extension.