INSTALLATIONN INSTRUCTIONS FOR GTKWAVE AND ICARUS VERILOGUNDER WINDOWS XP

Introduction

For some of you the installation of ICARUS VERILOG was not successful under WINDOWS and at present GTKWAVE requires all of its DLLs to be located in the local folder to each of your testbenches for simulation. In this short HOW-TO I propose solutions to these issues.

The ICARUS VERILOG issue appears to be caused by the inability of WINDOWS PATH to deal with spaces in folder names – but actually I am not sure.

I describe how to install ICARUS VERILOG and avoid this problem. I also show how to install GTKWAVE to avoid the local DLL issue. We will use the WINDOWS CMD prompt to run software with no need for CYGWIN.

Instructions

(0) First completely uninstall/erase all iverilog and gtkwave already installed on your system.

(1) Make a directory tmp in C: as follows.

(2) Download GTKWAVE.zip, iverilog-0.8.6_setup.exe and MU0.zip from the course website (we will use MU0 as a test case)

http://engnet.anu.edu.au/DEcourses/engn3213/Software/WINDOWS/

(3) Store gtkwave and icarus verilog in C:\tmp. Store MU0.zip in your working folder and unzip it. The working folder can be anywhere. It does not have to be 'C:\tmp'. Note that the MU0 stuff is stored in a folder named 'VERILOG'.

(4) Start the ICARUS VERILOG installation and install to the C:\tmp folder DIRECTLY (NOT TO THE DEFAULT FOLDER NAME ‘C:\Program Files\Icarus Verilog’) as shown below. If the installer places the ICARUS files in a folder 'C:\tmp\Icarus Verilog' then cut the contents of 'Icarus Verilog' and paste them into 'C:\tmp' and then delete the empty folder 'Icarus Verilog'.

(5) Now move GTKWAVE.zip to the C:\tmp\bin of ICARUS VERILOG.

(6) Unzip all the GTKWAVE.zip contents to C:\tmp\bin as shown.

(7) Now go to the ‘System Properties’ by right clicking on ‘My Computer’ (WINDOWS XP).

(7) Go to ‘environment variables ‘ under the Advanced tab of the ‘System Properties’.

(8) Edit the PATH environment to add the location C:\tmp\bin as follows(you may have to remove the old PATH reference to ‘C:\Program Files\Icarus Verilog’).

Click ‘OK’ on each pane to exit from the ‘System Properties’.

TESTING

Now open the CMD DOS prompt and navigate to the folder VERILOG where MU0 is located and run .\cmp.bat whose contents are as follows,

iverilog mu0_ctrl.v mem.v alu16.v mux16.v mux12.v vreg16.v TB_mu0_ctrl.vvvp ./a.out

Note that iverilog produces a NETLIST a.out and vvp actually runs the simulation.

As you know the test bench file TB_mu0_ctrl.v, contains the verilog code to create the ‘MU0.vcd’ file for gtkwave.

So now type,

gtkwave MU0.vcd

(Note that there is no need for ‘./’).

It should produce the following after you select the appropriate traces for display and resize the oscillograph time window.