Comments on Best HDL simulator

[Altera_Forum]

Hello, I've been using the simulator built into Quartus to do all my simulations. When Quartus 10.0 is released the simulator will be removed. Below are the following simulators that one could use: 

 │ ModelSim │ ModelSim SE │ ModelSim Altera Edition (AE) │ ModelSim Altera Starter Edition (ASE) │ VCS/VCS-MX │ NCSim │ Active-HDL │ Riviera-PRO  I have used ModelSim a few times. I would like to hear what others are using to simulate their design. Please let me know which one you feel is the best and easiest.  Thanks, joe

[Altera_Forum]

Modelsim AE will probably be best for most people, as it will come free (I think) with a quartus licence. But it doesnt have full TCL support and it is vastly slowed down from SE. I have been using modelsim for 3 years and found it to be great. 

 Previously I used Active HDL and found that to be good too. Tcl support was fine if a little odd, and its also a fairly decent project managment tool (unline modelsim).

[Altera_Forum]

I think ActiveHDL and Riviera use the same simulation kernel. I've not used Riviera but I think the differences are mainly to do with features. 

 Personally I think ActiveHDL is the best simulator that I've used. I hate going back to Modelsim afterwards. ActiveHDL has a really good GUI and project management tools; Modelsim GUI is really flaky and the project files are full of bugs; I'd almost say Modelsim is really a command line tool.  That said there is a free version of Modelsim from Altera (although Lattice give away a free version of ActiveHDL) so if money is an issue then Modelsim is OK - personally I don't like it but at the end of the day it gets the job done.  GHDL is a free open-source simulator which uses GTKWave to view data - it's worth a look - as a command line tool it's great and the language support is as good as if not better than some of the commercial tools.