Posted on 2012-10-23 by Philippe Faes
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How well does your compiler support VHDL 2008?

While some design teams will stick to VHDL-93 until the sun burns out, some people are using as much of the new VHDL-2008 standard as is supported by their tools. Big question is: how much is actually supported by which tools?

Spoiler Alert: The market leader in VHDL 2008 is Aldec.

The script

I’ve created a small script that can test your compiler against a set of VHDL files to see which constructs are supported. This is very much a work in progress. At this time, the script only deals with vcom compilers (Aldec  RivieraPro, Active-HDL and Mentor Graphics ModelSim). If anybody can help and provide extensions for other commercial (or free?) compilers, that would be great!

Also, the script only tests a limited set of VHDL-2008 features. If you want to test your favorite feature, please feel free to contribute.

Source code on GitHub

I’m releasing this under a BSD license, and you can download the source code from GitHub . Please use, abuse, adapt and send me your patches (or pull requests ).

See also