gEDA: A Plea for Programming Help (Icarus Verilog)

[Stephen Williams <steve-at-NOSPAMicarus_dot_com>]

Hi,

Looking for a job that pays less then nothing?-)

I'm looking for Perl/Verilog/Xilinx programmers who are interested
in the exciting (read: boring as hell) task of writing a regression
test rig for Xilinx synthesis. What I'm looking for is a one-button
regression test a la vvp_reg.pl in the ivtest test suite that tests
Xilinx synthesis.

It turns out with the Xilinx tool chain that the results of "map"
can be fed to ngd2ver to make a Verilog simulation of the EDIF
design that was written out by the -tfpga target of Icarus Verilog.
This can be used to make automatic regression tests. So I imagine
that the test rig would take a synthesizeable Verilog source, run
it through Icarus Verilog synthesis, ngdbuild, map, and ngd2ver
to get Verilog out. It would then combine the output Verilog with
another Verilog file, the test bench, to run the Verilog that
went through the whole synthesis and mapping path.

The current test rigs in the ivtest project (in sourceforge.net)
are written in perl. Even though I continue to avoid learning
perl, it is preferable that perl remain the standard for test rigs
in the test suite, unless someone demonstrates good results with
expect or the like.

With the work I'm doing on Virtex-II code generation (available
via CVS) I'm getting to the point where the -tfpga target is far
too complex to test ad hoc. The regression test suite for simulation
has been invaluable, partly because I did *not* write most of the
programs that it contains, but also because the test rig runs auto-
matically. I need something like that for Synthesis, and for Xilinx
synthesis we can use ngd2ver.

It's OK (even preferable) if it runs under Cygwin.

If Xilinx ever releases their Linux native tools, I would choose
to move over to them.
-- 
Steve Williams                "The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
steve at icarus.com           But I have promises to keep,
steve at picturel.com         and lines to code before I sleep,
http://www.picturel.com       And lines to code before I sleep."