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I promise I'm not turning this into a spam blog for my business (see the business twitter account for all my self-promotion), but I want to get the word out about early-adopter discount codes that I have made available.  I'll start an MSD specific blog and continue promoting things there as well. The discount code is for $99 off, which is a free Self-support subscription.  There are only 20 purchases available with this code: a5b2758959 Please give it a try, download and install the product, go through the Hello World tutorial , let me know how it all works. Thank you!

I have been working with commercial EDA tools (Verilog, VHDL, etc.) for years and always found them to be quite overpriced and frustrating.  Whenever I bring up the idea of using open source tools I get responses just like I got when first brining up Linux in the workplace back in 2001.  Things like, "you get what you pay for" and "it's only free if you don't value your time."  Red Hat (and SUSE/Novell) addressed those concerns for business people and made Linux mainstream (and put UNIX out of business and made a lot money for themselves in the process).  Maybe a similar business could do the same for open source EDA. To that end, I have quit my job and I've spent the past few week putting this business together.  What do you think? https://millenniumsoftwaredesign.com (AKA, https://msd.llc/ )

We all know that in the world of general software Open Source has all but won. Linux is everywhere. Nearly all programming languages are Open Source (meaning their compilers/interpreters). IDE's, build tools, revision control, syntax highlighters, refactoring tools, you name it, if it's a development tool it's Open Source. Major infrastructure is Open Source too. I mentioned the Linux operating system, but all the major applications are Open Source too: web servers, databases, queueing systems, messaging systems, load balancing, caching systems, GUI frameworks, encryption, authentication, email servers, instant messaging servers, blog engines, you name it. In the world of Electronic Design Automation (EDA), Open Source has not won. We do now develop on Linux and we use a lot of ancillary tools from the software world that are Open Source such as scripting languages, text editors, databases, web frameworks, build systems, and so forth, but our core tools are still very mu...

At DVCon 2013 I asked JL Gray 's panel if we would ever have Free tools, like the software world. None of panelists seemed to think so, one of the panelists, a Mentor employee, scoffed, "you get what you pay for with free tools." Never mind that their (and Cadence's and Synopsys's) products are very likely developed with tools that contain millions of lines of Free software. So, to work towards answering my own question, I spent a little time and looked for Free/Open Source verilog simulators. Here's what I found: Icarus Verilog GPL Cver PVSim Verilog Simulator VeriWell Verilog Simulator I have personally used Icarus and Cver before, but not very extensively.  They were usable and seemed pretty complete, for Verilog.  None of the above claim any support of SystemVerilog except for Icarus.  The Icarus developer at one point expressed abhorrence at SystemVerilog but it seems support for some parts of the language have been added. PVSim and Veri...

I have written A UNIX/Linux environment manager that allows on-the-fly configuration of your shell environment. It's called, albion . Using albion, environment variables, aliases, functions, and so forth can be changed without requiring you to do the tedious log-out-and-log-back-in-again routine. Simply type 'albion load ' and your shell environment will be reconfigured according to the specification in your environment file. It should work with any POSIXy shell (bash, ksh, zsh, etc.) Albion is similar to the Environment Modules Project , however, environment configuration files (configs) are written in standard shell language, not tcl. Another improvement over modules is that when unloaded, the effect of the configs is correctly undone, even if the configs have changed or been deleted after loading. The main albion tool is written in Python, with some supporting pieces written in POSIX shell code. albion is currently alpha quality. The core functionality seems to be ...

Trivial to defeat for the dishonest, a complete hassle and waste of time for the honest, who are we, in the EDA industry, kidding with flexlm licensing? As customers we buy this incredibly sophisticated and powerful (and expensive!) simulation and synthesis software, and then it fails to run at times because of this fragile, buggy license software wrapper around it. Why do we put up with it? And vendors, you treat your enterprise customers, who shell out tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars for your software, as if you don't trust them? You force them to set up, troubleshoot, and babysit these finicky and frail license servers, just so they can run the software they've already paid you (a lot!) for? Why?