Many of our users love Mac computers. Too bad that the mainstream EDA sector does not. There are hardly any EDA tools available for Mac, so most people use scripts to run their simulations on a remote (or a virtualized) Linux machine. In this blog post, I will explain how you can trick your Mac (or rather: your Sigasi tool) in to believing that it can run ModelSim, just like I showed you in this screencast.

Disclaimer 1: This is in no way a crack; we're not messing with ModelSim! You'll need a legal copy and a valid license, which you can get from your Mentor Graphics sales rep, or (a limited version, free of charge) from the Altera website

Disclaimer 2: Consider this semi-advanced stuff. I'm sharing this idea because I think it will be useful to other people, it is not a supported Sigasi feature.

Disclaimer 3: I hate discaimers!

We will need a computer with SSH acces that has a working version of ModelSim installed. I suggest you use a Linux computer because Mac OSX and Linux are both Unix-like systems. If you use a Windows compile server, you may run in to troubles with the path format (backslashes on Windows!). You can either use a remote computer, or set up a virtual machine (using something like Parallels or VirtualBox) on your Mac.

You will need the following info:

• the host name (or IP address) of your build server
• your user name on that server
• the install path of ModelSim on the server

You also need to set up an SSH key so that you can log on to the server without typing your password.

Next, we will create a fake ModelSim installation dir on the Mac. This directory will contain one script, remote_modelsim.sh and several symlinks to this script.

mkdir ~/fakeModelSim
cd ~/fakeModelSim
touch remote_modelsim.sh
ln -s  remote_modelsim.sh vsim
ln -s  remote_modelsim.sh vcom
ln -s  remote_modelsim.sh vlib

The fakeModelSim script copies the files to the build server and executes the specified ModelSim command.

#!/bin/sh

#configuration
REMOTE_USER=john.doe
REMOTE_HOST=122.22.22.221
REMOTE_HOME='/home/john.doe'
REMOTE_MODELSIM_DIR='/opt/altera/10.0/modelsim_ase/bin'

COMMAND=`basename $0`
# calculate the arguments, with proper quotes around each argument
for ARG in "$@"
do
        ARGS="$ARGS \"$ARG\""
done

# Calculate a directory on the remote build server, where we can put our data
HASH=$(echo ${PWD} ${HOSTNAME} ${USER} | shasum | cut -c1-32)
REMOTE_DIR=${REMOTE_HOME}/remote_compilation/${HASH}

# sync the project directory. You don't need this if you are using a network shared folder.
function try_rsync(){
	rsync -r ${PWD}/* ${REMOTE_USER}@${REMOTE_HOST}:${REMOTE_DIR}
}
function createRemoteDir(){
    echo "rsync failed, probably because the remote directory $REMOTE_DIR did not exits. Retrying." >&2
	ssh ${REMOTE_USER}@${REMOTE_HOST} "mkdir -p ${REMOTE_DIR}"
}
try_rsync || ( createRemoteDir && try_rsync ) || exit -1
# end sync

REMOTE_SCRIPT=\
"cd ${REMOTE_DIR}; "\
"MODELSIM_DIR=/opt/altera/10.0/modelsim_ase/bin ; "\
"/opt/altera/10.0/modelsim_ase/bin/$COMMAND $ARGS"

# echo "# Running remote command $REMOTE_SCRIPT"
ssh ${REMOTE_USER}@${REMOTE_HOST}  $REMOTE_SCRIPT

Now all you need to do, is tell Sigasi (or whatever tool you are using) to use ~/fakeModelSim as path for the ModelSim executables.

Other tools and Feedback

Al of this will work just as well with Xilinx ISim, or with the Altera Quartus II, or for a million other EDA and non-EDA tools. You can extend the script to copy the compiled files back to your local computer, or you can use a shared folder instead of rsync. Feel free to improve and share.

Do you like this script? Do you like you Mac? Do you have a better way of designing hardware with your Mac? Talk to me in the comments section, below!