gEDA: Icarus Verilog snapshot 20001112

[Stephen Williams <steve-at-NOSPAMicarus_dot_com>]

Here's another in the endless stream of Icarus Verilog snapshots.

    <ftp://icarus.com/pub/eda/verilog/snapshots/verilog-20001112.tar.gz>

This snapshot includes support for MOS et al devices as contributed
by Tim Leight. It appears to actually work as advertised, and I also
have from him a collection of tests that I'll be adding to the test
suite as soon as I get copyright information from him. So if you have
been dreaming of simulating MOS devices with Icarus Verilog, give this
a try. This update also fixed PR#27.

I've also cleared up a few bugs related to unconnected module ports.
Module port syntax is pretty byzantine, as PR#38 shows.

The loadable target API has gained access to flip-flops. This is required
for PLD code generation to work. I think the ivl_target API now supports
the minimum devices needed to generate PLD files, and I'm on to the task
of getting ancillary PAL support working.

WHAT'S NEXT

It has been a while since the last stable release, and the now rather
old 0.3 release is becoming increasingly irrelevant. This means that it
is time to start thinking about 0.4, even though my original goals have
not been met. In fact, I'm going to put to you a new set of goals for the
next stable release.

I am planning to get reasonably stable PLD synthesis working, at least
for 22v10 devices. This includes a PLD toolkit to support it. This task is
actually of imminent value to day-job colleagues, so there is a little
bit of motivation here. TPLD support will include, by the way, a JEDEC
decompiler that generates Verilog. We have plenty of legacy parts that
need to be converted to modern tools.

I need to go through the pending PR#s and resolve as many of them as
possible. It would be nice to fix ALL of them but that seems unlikely.
I will do what I can, then move what I can't to ``postponed'' until after
the release. I encourage you to get in any bug reports that you might
be sitting on.

If you have any other requests that you want to make 0.4, speak up.
I'm not setting a schedule yet, but soon.
-- 
Steve Williams                "The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
steve@icarus.com              But I have promises to keep,
steve@picturel.com            and lines to code before I sleep,
http://www.picturel.com       And lines to code before I sleep."