Designs often reuse a common set of our Verilog source files. For example, when you’re designing using a particular family of FPGAs or ASICs, you will need to compile the vendor-provided Verilog source files for those parts. Instead of recompiling these files for each new design, you can compile them once into a symbolic library (sometimes referred to as a compiled library), then just reference that symbolic library in your designs. With this approach, you only need to recompile the vendor’s source files when you update your simulator to a newer version.
Cells and Snapshots
A symbolic library contains cells and snapshots. Cells represent the definitions for objects such as modules and User-Defined Primitives (UDPs) that are created when source files are compiled into a library. Snapshots are created during simulation elaboration and represent a fully built “simulation” that can be executed.
Within a library, cell and snapshot names must be unique and any attempt to compile a cell into a library that already contains a cell of that name will cause the original cell to be overwritten. However, cells and snapshots of the same name can exist in different libraries.
Creating Symbolic Libraries
In most Verilog compilers, a symbolic library is given both a logical name (e.g. “work”) and a physical name that indicates it’s storage location (e.g. “c:\myproject\scd_work”). The logical name is used when referring to a symbolic library in the source code or when passing a library name as a command-line option to the verilog compiler, so that the source code and script files don’t have to depend on the library’s location on a particular computer. The physical name is only used to specify the location of the symbolic library (and typically only when the library is first created). The mapping between these two names is specified using a command-line library tool that can create and manipulate symbolic libraries and the resulting mappings are stored into a “map file”. In simx, for example, this command-line tool is called simxlib. In both Mentor Graphics ModelSim and Aldec Active HDL, the library tool is called vlib.
Work: the Default Symbolic Library
By default, sources files will be compiled into a compiled library with the symbolic name of “work“, unless a different destination library is specified via the --work <destination_library_name> compiler option. Also by default, the work library will be mapped to a subdirectory of the current working directory called scd_work, unless a map file is passed to the compiler that specifies a different physical path name for the library. This default mapping will be written into a default map file called scd.lib which simx will subsequently load automatically whenever simulations are run from this directory. The above defaults allow simx to be used without having to worry about symbolic libraries, if you don’t plan to take advantage of them to avoid re-compiling shared Verilog code.
By contrast, some compilers require you to create at least one symbolic library using their library tool before you can compile code with these simulators, so if you use BugHunter to compile code with ModelSim or ActiveHDL, you will note that it first launches vlib to create a work library before it launches the actual Verilog or VHDL compilers (aka vlog or vsim) for these simulators.
Example Commands for Creating and Using Symbolic Libraries
To compile test1.v and add it’s contents to the default library called “work”, you can either directly specify the work library with the -work option:
simx --work work test1.v
or let the simulator just use work by default:
simx test1.v
In the above commands, the work library will be automatically created in a subdirectory called scd_work if it doesn’t already exist.
To create a library with the logical name vendor1 located at c:\vendor1 and compile a set of files into this library, use the following commands:
simxlib --create c:\vendor1
simx --work vendor1 test1.v test2.v test3.v
The above commands also create a scd.lib file in the current directory with the following contents:
DEFINE vendor1 c:/vendor1
This line says that the logical library name vendor1 maps to the physical library located at c:\vendor1.