Introduction

VHDL is a design entry language which is commonly used for hardware description purpose.Several development tools are available for VHDL for compilation,simulation and different views like RTL level,Gate level etc.Most of them are closed and proprietary,but no need to disappoint by that,FOSS world always gives a solution to us,tools like ghdl,gtkwave,freehdl etc are available under public licenses like GPL.The difficulty (at beginner level) with these tools is that there is no full-fledged IDE for compilation, simulation, viewing purpose compared to other commercial softwares.This poses an issue for beginners especially in student community to use FOSS tools for Hardware designing.Developing a new IDE for 1 or 2 languages from the scratch is not a good idea in view of cost and other aspects,so the idea is to provide support for VHDL under existing IDEs. We have successfully used ghdl,gtkwave for VHDL Lab(Computer Science students) in our college without any IDE support, using terminal,vi editor and simple scripts.Now working towards integrating VHDL support into netbeans and is in significant progress.

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