zamiaCAD - Open Source Platform for Advanced Hardware Design
zamiaCAD is a modular and extensible platform for advanced hardware
design, analysis, and research. Its core components are the language
independent instantiation graph (IG) data structure, the language
dependent frontends generating an IG, and applications working on the
IG data structure. The frontends consist of a parser and an
elaboration engine. Currently, VHDL has a complete frontend, Verilog
only has a parser. Applications like a simulator and an eclipse GUI
are built on top of the IG and potentially language dependent
structures like the abstract syntax tree. Currently, the zamiaCAD
platform consists of more than 200k lines of Java code. More
details
There are three user categories of the zamiaCAD platform:
- developers writing EDA tools
- endusers using EDA tools coming with the platfrom
- researches prototyping research algorithms
The most important zamiaCAD features are
- IDE for VHDL: eclipse plugin, code is scalable and has handled
very large industrial designs, usable, if prepared to report
bugs. For details, see the tutorial for details
- Simulator support: with external simulator and vcd files, usable
to display waveform and relate values to source code. A complete,
standards-compliant built-in simulator is under development. While
it is not complete yet and has not been tuned for performance, it
already offers very quick startup and turnaround times and is a
key tool providing for quick, interactive development of smaller
hardware designs and cores.
- Synthesis: Code for generating RTL graph is currently under early
development
For a more complete list of features see the feature page
The zamiaCAD project currently aims for
- EDA developers and researchers participating in the development of
the project
- Testers working with the zamiaCAD IDE, thus testing zamia platform
and applications, and willing to write bugreports with small VHDL
testcases showing the problems
- Companies looking for commercial support and development for the
zamiaCAD platform or tools
To test zamiaCAD download version 0.10.0 for Linux or Windows. The tutorial helps getting
started. If you want to see the zamiaCAD code and get started
developing see getting started
To participate in the project please contact us through the mailing
lists, through the forums, or through our support mail address, see the
contact page
Feedback of any kind is very welcome.
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