Sunday, March 15, 2009

Playing With Verilog

I got bored with work today (yeah, yeah, I should just get on with it, blahblah, yadayada :-)) so I played with Verilog. I learn faster from code I can actually run, so having a way to execute the Verilog programs was an essential first step. I used Icarus Verilog, a free Verilog compiler and simulator that I found a while ago. Icarus is available as a Debian package so installation was just a "sudo aptitude install verilog" away. Why the package is named verilog instead of icarus, I'll never know. I verified that the installation worked using the sample programs on the Icarus wiki site.

With a working Verilog simulator at hand, I dove into a tutorial to learn more about the language. The tutorial is good but sometimes uses language features before they have been taught, which is a bit naughty. All the example code can be downloaded which saves much time when trying the many examples. Unfortunately, I didn't get through the whole tutorial as it is quite long.

Today was an extremely quick introduction to Verilog so I still have much to learn before I could tackle something more serious. Problem is, I don't have any projects in mind where I might actually need Verilog, so it might a while before I get the urge to spend more time on it. And ultimately, without real hardware to play with, there is a limit to how interesting Verilog can be.

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