From NetFPGAWiki

Multiple environments

Is it worthwhile supporting multiple simulation environments? Some people may have preferences for other environments (if they already have and use the other enviroment).

If we do support multiple environments who should create the necessary infrastructure? Should we? Or should we get users to submit patches/scripts?

If we do want to support multiple environments, should we design things with that goal in mind right now? How?

Email from John Lockwood

Glen,

  I think the move to ModelSim would be very positive. 
ModelSim is not (at all) free, but it is widely used at universities 
working on ASIC and FPGA designs.  Mentor Graphics has a very active
University program.

  We found it useful to support scipts using Cygwin.  Cygwin brings
all of the GNU Perl and shell tools to Windows.  And it is open and
free.  Only enhancements to Cygwin tools themseleves would be
restricted to the GPL.

-john lockwood

Email from Paul Hartke

As I understand it, proliferation of NetFPGA2.1 is a major goal of the
project.  That means that all the components for successful usage of
NetFPGA2.1 should be as readily available as possible.  There are three
parts:

1) The physical manifestation of the NetFPGA2.1 board.  Successfully
utilized on other projects, the current plan is to work with Digilent for
back end fulfillment.   There will likely be one price for academics and
another for industrial users.
2) The NetFPGA2.1 HW/SW reference designs/demos and associated documentation
including board schematics.  I believe Nick intends to make this all "freely
available" but I'm not sure the license--something to add to the list to
review.
3) Ready availability of the commercial tools to productively utilize
NetFPGA2.1  There are two main ones.  The Xilinx FPGA development tools
which are available to academics via the Xilinx University Program (XUP)
and commercial entities on the open market.  The other is the HDL
simulator.  For FPGA development, Modelsim is by far the dominant simulator
in usage.  Its also the main one used by academics.  Xilinx is developing
its own simulator but its not quite there yet.  Probably a year from now it
will be so NetFPGA2.1 users will have one less tool to acquire.  Are any
other tools not part of a standard Linux distribution (such as perl, make,
etc) utilized?

I think Modelsim is the way to go because its more than sufficient for the
job and both decreases the barrier of entry for new folks to start using
NetFPGA2.1 and also get support from the larger community via google and
usual newsgroups.

Paul