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For some empirical data that may be useful:
http://www.deepchip.com/items/dvcon07-02.html
The results, although two years old, show that Verilog is a bit more widely used.

I've used both, and I prefer Verilog. Good luck with your course preparation.

This issue of deepchip has some interesting sections on outsourcing, how hiring really goes on behind the scenes, some interesting data and statistics
on actual hirings, and how much they spend on hiring people (new grads, monster, stealing people from other companies, etc).

very very interesting.

I saw 3-4x performance gains on Redhat 8.0, Xeon 2.8GHz, 4GB ECC.

3-4x compared to what? That's a simple question... care to answer it?

My server was a nice Altus 130 with dual Athlon 2600MP and 4 Gb of ram, and a nice, EDA vendor supported Red Hat 7.2. Now, I happen to know that the Athlon CPUs tends to get starved since the CPU-Memory bus isn't quick enough to keep it up for some things, like verilog simulations, or on various benchmark reports that you can find at various sites. That's why even my old Sun Blade 1000s with only 600 Mhz CPUs was able to keep up. The Suns have a better memory bus. A P4 with the 800 Mhz bus would do better that the Athlons, and let the greater CPU power show. The 533 Mhz bus wasn't really different that the Athlon.

This was VerilogXL, NCVerilog and Design Compiler.

We run Modelsim and VCS. So? I might believe NCVerilog would be Modelsim, but VCS?

Your FUD doesn't hold water "anonymous coward".

There is FUD flying alright, but its mainly anti-Sun FUD coming from you. Well, that might be a little harsh. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and just assume that you are ignorant and unfamiliar with your vendors plans and supported tools. Since I'm in a charitable mood I'll help you out.

Why don't you try visiting DeepChip? You will find, if you read carefully, that Linux is far from a universal win, although there are many success stories. Unfortunately many of the success stories sound sort of like yours-- "I have a hot, brand new Linux box that beats some sort of old Sun!! Linux RULES!!" If you cast your net wider to check FPGA sites, and various other ones, the story is about the same.

Here is the Cadence SUPPORTED HARDWARE PLATFORMS MATRIX FOR 32 BIT platforms. You will notice that there are large gaps in the Linux support, and that it is for older releases.

There is also a Cadence SUPPORTED HARDWARE PLATFORMS MATRIX FOR 64-BIT APPLICATIONS, but I wouldn't bother looking for any Linux based tools there for at least a year or two, if ever. Even IBM's AIX doesn't fare so well there.

What about Synopsys? Well, their baseline for building EDA tools on X86 Linux is going to be Red Hat 7.2 (the one that is EOLed) for some time to come, and it will only support binary compatible versions. (I will also note that Synopsys has dropped support for various intermediate Red Hat releases on various tools due to problems, so you might find that 7.0 and 7.3 supported, but not 7.1 or 7.3). On the Itanium Synopsys is going to support Red Hat Enterprise (you know, the cheap one - not.) Although why you would buy an Itanium based system and run Red Hat instead of HP/UX is beyond me. HP/UX is far more mature and has a much larger software base than Linux, but I guess some people will run Linux just to run Linux.

What about Mentor Graphics? Their supported platform release history looks a lot like the other two. There are lots of tools that only run on old Linux releases, and gaps in the releases.

As You can read in the Red Hat Network 2.6.0 Release Notes that they have End Of Lifed Red Hat 6.2-7.0. 7.2 should be EOL about now too.

As you can see, almost all EDA tools from the major EDA vendors are only supported on obsolete, unsupported Linux releases. If you put in a little effort, you will find that many of them are moving to run only on the professional versions o

After spending the last 5 years working on u-arch design and implementation as well as different MGate ASICs I consider myself an intermediate, half senior ASIC designer.

My experience so far have made me into an old-schooler. Design is done simple and conservative. Things like:

(1) Whiteboards are good design tools. Use colors for datapath, control, exception/IRQ/flags, clocks etc.

(2) Design on whiteboard && paper == Simple code. As others have stated, a good thought out design doesn't require advanced language features. This in turn means less tool problems, faster toolruns etc.

(3) Learn the features of the language and their HW equivalents. Build test designs for different language constructs, guess the HW (including routing, registers and gates). Learn to see the HW when you write the code.

(4) Emacs + language mode == high productivity. Ignore managers that believe that Visual HDL, Renoir etc == good designs. (They don't).
Tools that give you the block hierarchy and possibly block interfaces with wires are very useful. But the actual contents should be written.

(5) Stick with Verilog. Ah! A language war you say. But there it really isn't. It's culture. EDA tools are just about always developed in the US. Americanos generally use Verilog, knows Verilog and are more comfortable with Verilog. This means that (A) The tools are developed for Verilog first and (B) generally have fewer bugs in the Verilog versions.

Superlog is a super language and I would love to use it - when it's at least as supported by the EDA vendors as VHDL. SystemC and other C-things? Look at the comments by colleguages in the ESNUG maillists. I wouldn't bet my design methodology on those languages and tools.

Platforms? NT was hailed as the new EDA platform, it went away. Linux is doing hefty inroads, they are everywhere at least as workstations for design entry, block simulation and synthesis jobs. Quite a few of the new tools are being developed on Linux and ported to Solaris (and HP-UX - the next OS to go in EDA?).

I have used VHDL and Verilog extensively. The ability to describe the HW is roughly the same in each of them. It's much more important to do a good arhitecture, partitioning and models. Learn that, pick up the language of choice and do lots of testruns. Good luck!

it sure is. Isn't it ?

it sure is. Isn't it ?

IT really is. A sun workstation rocks

IT really is. A sun workstation rocks

It sure does.