Synopsys VCS Tutorial 1 -- Installation

Welcome to Synopsys tutorial series

These tutorial series aim to help you getting started with RTL design using Synopsys VLSI tool-chain, mainly VCS, DC and PT. The series of demo projects are designed for you to get familiar with using and designing common digital building blocks, such as adder, FIFO, more advanced functions including CPUs, such as MIPS implementation, memory interfaces, such as DMA, and communication interfaces, such as UART, I2C, SPI. Though standard commercial intellectual property (IP) cells are mostly available in FPGA development kits, IP providers and IC manufacturers. it takes time and effort to tailor the needed designs into your applications. It also takes team work to design any of the sophisticated commercial IP cells. These labs are not intended to substitute or compete with any of the commercial IP libraries. In fact, most of my intuitions of the projects are from the opensource hardware community which are greatly accessible on the internet. After all, it’s a great way to learn by sharing.

Preparation

1. Desktop computer recommended configurations:
   a. more than 200 GB hard disk drive;
   b. 8 GB memory;
   c. Linux OS (if you’re using a Windows machine, the easiest way is to install a virtual machine for hosting Linux machine);
   d. a 8GB or bigger USB flash driver.
2. Software Packages available resources:
   a. Linux OS, recommended for a stabilized release, such as CentOS-7-x86_64-DVD-1511, available link;
   b. vMware workstation virtual machine, a free non-commercial use version is available at link;
   c. Synopsys toolchain.

Install centos 7 on vMware virtual machine

Recommended configurations:
a. Hard disk: 100GB;
b. Memory: 2GB;
c. Processor: 4;
d. USB3.0 compatibility.
Enable “VMUSBArbService” from the task manager on your Windows machine if the USB flash driver could not be detected by the virtual machine.
You could also try to mount a shared folder using smb client on your virtual machine.

Install Synopsys Tool-chain

1. Change network adapter name on CentOS7

• switch to sudo user from terminal.

 		# su
 		# ifconfig

•