Welcome to GHDL Sample Project

This project provides an easy but power full building system for VHDL code to run simulations using GHDL project.

Install Dependencies

In order to use this sample project and building system you need first to install GHDL. To install GHDL follow this.

Indexing VHDL Files

In order to GHDL to work it has to index all entities from all VHDL source files. For doing so simply run;

cd <your-project-code-path>
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make index

Run Tests

To build the test’s binaries you first need to;

cd <your-project-code-path>/build
make check

The summary of the tests will be displayed and it looks like the following;

For every test there’s one VCD trace file automatically created. You can find the VCD files at <your-project-code-path>/build/trace/. The traces are placed according to the folder structure of the <your-project-code-path>/test/ directory.

Building System Description

Our code is completely IDE independent. For supporting the compiling and simulation of the code we had to develop our own building system using CMake.

The building system is based on two simple yet powerful CMake macros.

# Add source directory
add_sources_directory(dir1 dir2 ...)

# Add source file
add_sources(file1 file2 ...)

The basic idea behind our building system is to specify directories having source codes and inside every directory with sources specify which files are source files. For example, <your-project-code-path>/src/CMakeLists.txt, specifies common, decoder and encoder as sources directories as follows;

# Add source directory
add_sources_directory(adder/
                      viterbi_encoder/)

Furthermore, <your-project-code-path>/src/viterbi_encoder/CMakeLists.txt should look like;

# Add sources
add_sources(viterbi_encoder.vhdl
            next_state_lkup_table.vhdl
            output_lkup_table.vhdl)

Note

• You can specify source code directories and files in the same CMakeLists.txt file.
• You can specify as many source code directories and files using the same macro call (add_sources_directory(...) and add_sources(...) respectively).
• Every source code directory added using add_sources_directory(...) has to contain a CMakeLists.txt file.

Our main CMakeLists.txt at <your-project-code-path> does the rest.

Test Building System

For tests we have a simliar building system but the CMake macros are named differently. They are the following;

# Add test source directory
add_test_sources_directory(dir1 dir2 ...)

# Add test source file
add_test_sources(file1 file2 ...)