Incisive errors when compiling Vunit VHDL sources

[petandpal]

I am trying to run Incisive 15.20 with Vunit but I get syntax errors when compiling the vunit_lib library as shown below:

The MMSIG error is described as:

I get a lot more errors if I include the verification components or the OSVVM packages. Is there any easy way to get past these errors (with options) or am I doing something wrong?

Thanks.

[LarsAsplund]

Initially when the Incisive support was added I remember that there were many issues related to the VHDL standard so it was not possible to to get anything beyond VHDL-93 to work. OSVVM and some of our own packages are VHDL-2008 so the first step would be to set the VUNIT_VHDL_STANDARD environment variable to 93. That will exclude such packages from the compilation. However, the offending package is always included and I can't see anything wrong with that line. Can you? I recommend that you report this to Cadance. Maybe you can reduce the problem to a much smaller example that's easier for them to debug but make sure to reference VUnit as I know they've done some testing internally.

[petandpal]

Lars,

I tried to get a simple example to work with a Cadence engineer. They are able to compile it on their side. But it does not work on my system. So perhaps there is an issue with my installation.

Because I do not have root access to my Python installation directory, I use the third method of installation of vunit - essentially downloading vunit_hdl-4.0.8.tar.gz from PyPI and untarring it. This does produce all the vunit/vunit_hdl.egg-info directories and files but may be some files are missing or unextracted? Could that explain this?

When I run run setup.py install, it fails because I don't have root access. I tried to use the --install-dir and --prefix options but they don't work. Even putting them inside the setup.cfg file makes no difference. Is there a way to run install into my local directory at all?

[eine]

@petandpal, you can try defining envvar PYTHONPATH=/path/to/your/vunit/repo.

[petandpal]

That's what I do currently.

[eine]

When you do that, you do not need to install VUnit by running setup.py. Just go to your design and execute the corresponding run.py directly. Is this what you are doing?

[petandpal]

Yep.

[petandpal]

And its not working this way. So I was thinking may be I must be missing something by not installing it the recommended way. So you are confirming that this should not be the source of my issue with compiling to Cadence?

[eine]

With either GHDL or ModelSim/QuestaSim, the following procedure works:

mkdir /tmp/vunit
#download VUnit to /tmp/vunit with any of git, curl, wget...
export PYTHONPATH=/tmp/vunit
pip3 install colorama
cd /tmp/vunit/examples/vhdl/array
python3 run.py -v

Is colorama available on your system? Can you please post the exact error messages that you are getting (in case they are different from the screenshots)?

[petandpal]

I re-downloaded Vunit into a different directory and set PYTHONPATH to that directory/vunit_hdl-4.0.8.

Now when I run the array example, I see two different errors when I run Xcelium/Incisive.The errors are the same with Python 2 or 3. I do have colorama installed. When I run Questasim in the same directory, it works fine. Not sure what to do next!!!

Here is the Xcelium error snapshot:

Here is the Incisive error snapshot:

[LarsAsplund]

Did you set VUNIT_VHDL_STANDARD to 93? If you do you can't have the context statement in your testbench but rather replace that with the use statements within.

[movadaml]

I hit this exact issue recently while evaluating vunit. The following failed with the same error:

• ./run.py Note that irun_compile_vhdl_file_vunit_lib.args includes "-v200x"
• VUNIT_VHDL_STANDARD=93 ./run.py Note that irun_compile_vhdl_file_vunit_lib.args includes "-v93"

I was able to work around this by commenting out the prototype for "procedure decode". A permanent workaround might be to define a wrapper function with a different name for the alias.

After this, I got many compile errors in ansi_pkg.vhd - seems to have an issue with character literals: `=== Command output: === constant colors_enabled : string_ptr_t := new_string_ptr("0");	ncvhdl_p: *E,ILSTCH (xxx/lib64/python3.6/site-packages/vunit/vhdl/logging/src/ansi_pkg.vhd,76	60): illegal character in string literal - '0' [7.3.1]. return get(colors_enabled, 1) = '1';
ncvhdl_p: *E,IDENRD (xxx/lib64/python3.6/site-packages/vunit/vhdl/logging/src/ansi_pkg.vhd,80	38): identifier ('1') is not visible, as it is directly visible via use clauses from more than one design unit. This results in conflict. This object is defined at:

STD.STANDARD STD.STANDARD VUNIT_LIB.STRING_PTR_PKG . while idx <= msg'high and msg(idx) /= 'm' loop	ncvhdl_p: *E,IDENRD (xxx/lib64/python3.6/site-packages/vunit/vhdl/logging/src/ansi_pkg.vhd,126	48): identifier ('m') is not visible, as it is directly visible via use clauses from more than one design unit. This results in conflict. This object is defined at: STD.STANDARD VUNIT_LIB.STRING_PTR_PKG . if msg(i) = 'm' then
ncvhdl_p: *E,IDENRD (xxx/lib64/python3.6/site-packages/vunit/vhdl/logging/src/ansi_pkg.vhd,143	20): identifier ('m') is not visible, as it is directly visible via use clauses from more than one design unit. This results in conflict. This object is defined at:

STD.STANDARD VUNIT_LIB.STRING_PTR_PKG . assert false report "incomplete color escape did not end with 'm'"; | ncvhdl_p: *E,ILSTCH (xxx/lib64/python3.6/site-packages/vunit/vhdl/logging/src/ansi_pkg.vhd,148|25): illegal character in string literal - 'i' [7.3.1]. assert false report "incomplete color escape did not end with 'm'"; `

• irun(64): 15.20-s020: (c) Copyright 1995-2017 Cadence Design Systems, Inc.
• pip show vunit-hdl Name: vunit-hdl Version: 4.3.0

[c-thaler]

illegal character in string literal identifier ('1') is not visible, as it is directly visible via use clauses from more than one design unit. This results in conflict. This object is defined at: STD.STANDARD STD.STANDARD VUNIT_LIB.STRING_PTR_PKG .

These errors are somehow caused by the following lines in "string_ptr_pkg.vhd":

alias  val_t  is character;
alias  vec_t  is string;

I commented them out and replaced their occurences in "string_ptr_pkg.vhd" with "character", resp. "string". That fixed "ansi_pkg.vhd" for me.

[LarsAsplund]

@c-thaler What version of Incisive/Xcelium are you using?

[c-thaler]

@LarsAsplund I'm using Incisive 9.2. Which is from around 2011.

I did some more investigations on this. And it was actually only the alias of the character that caused the error. I replaced it with subtype val_t is character;.

To make VUnit work with Incisive 9.2, I had to fix some more things. You can find them in the following two commits on my fork: https://github.com/tes-gfx/vunit/commit/9fbcc6b0ea9e5af0fe825887ff2edb15032350d9 https://github.com/tes-gfx/vunit/commit/9ee8bec3ab3b0d0056494dec3ce5092de8f32aaa