DVT Build Configurations Compatibility Modes - Part I - DVT Default Compatibility Mode

Overview

A compatibility mode defines how DVT Eclipse IDE decides what top files to parse and with what language syntax to parse them.

By default, a build file uses the DVT compatibility mode syntax to specify compilation directives. In order to simplify DVT, Verissimo or Specador integration into your company flows, you can enable the parsing of simulator specific compilation directives in build files. This is done by specifying a compatibility mode corresponding to the tools that you use, for example ius.irun or vcs.vlogan.

Part I of this demo movie series illustrates some common pitfalls that might arise when using Default DVT Compatibility Mode, and how to solve such problems.

Details

Introduction

Let's consider a SystemVerilog project which contains source files with various extensions: .sv, .v, .foo. After the build is done, we notice some compilation errors are reported, although we know the code is correct.

Compilation Errors

The first error is issued because the .v file has been compiled using Verilog 2001 syntax, as stated in the detailed error message. The second error appears because the .foo file has not been compiled at all. Notice it does not have the blue bullet decoration and also does not show up in the compile order view.

Fixing the Problems

To fix the first problem, we must instruct the DVT to compile .v files using SystemVerilog syntax. Open the .dvt/default.build file and add an entry which maps the .v extension to the SystemVerilog language syntax.

To fix the second problem, we append to default.build a line which instructs DVT to compile unknown extensions like .foo with a default language flavor, in our case SystemVerilog.

After a fresh build, all our files have been compiled using the proper syntax and the compilation errors have disappeared.