Aldec Active-HDL

What works

Licensing can be bothersome, but does work. The license must match your network interface's MAC address, there ideally should be only one such network interface to avoid confusing the software, and the license must be in the right place for Diamond and Active-HDL (those places are configured in several different and confusing ways, reinstalling Diamond can be the simplest way to make the license found again).

Compiling (not simulating) Verilog/SystemVerilog projects works

The design browser, editor, workspaces, library manager, assertion viewer and waveform work.

What does not

Simulation fails to initialize (bug #48449), this means designs cannot be tested. A workaround is unfortunately not easy without touching the binary or modifying Wine.

If a file open in the Active-HDL editor is modified outside of it, Active-HDL will freeze while trying to open a message dialog, and needs to be killed.

Workarounds

If source files need to be modified outside Active-HDL, the setting in Preferences -> Editors -> General can be changed to only notify of changes for the active file, instead of all open files. This prevents a freeze as long as the modified file wasn't active in the editor (this feature unfortunately cannot be disabled entirely).

If the simulator initialization bug is somehow worked-around (which I don't have a straightforward, reproducible method for), then simulation, assertion and other test-bench features work flawlessly.

What was not tested

Compiling VHDL or SystemC code was not tested (except for the VHDL vendor Libraries required for simulating Lattice designs, which do work).

Many advanced Active-HDL features (and features for which the license is not provided with Diamond) were not tested.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU: Nvidia
• Driver: proprietary

Additional Comments

Active-HDL is an HDL Design/Simulation environment, but without workarounds only compiling and basic editing work (when it does not freeze).

As a result, this version is almost unusable on Wine out of the box.