Installing Icarus Verilog and GTKWave on MacOS

Hi everyone,

 

Here is a guide on installing Icarus Verilog and GTKWave on MacOS.

Homebrew

The easiest way to install Verilog is through a tool called homebrew, which is like a package manager for MacOS. I will not be detailing how its done but information can be found online (for example on the Homebrew site)

Finding the profile file

In order to set up some of the tooling, the relevant profile file for the shell will have to be located. If the shell is zsh (which is the default on newer systems), the needed file is located in ~/.zprofile. Otherwise, the file is ~/.bash_profile (where ~ is the home directory).

The type of shell should be visible when opening a terminal window at the top in the window title (i.e., it should say zsh if it is a zsh shell).

Installing Icarus Verilog

Following the guide here, in the terminal, first execute brew install bison, then depending on your profile file 

echo 'export PATH="/usr/local/opt/bison/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bash_profile

or

echo 'export PATH="/usr/local/opt/bison/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.zprofile

Then, run brew install icarus-verilog. Verilog should now be installed.

Installing GTKWave

First, download the windows version of GTKWave from their sourceforge, here. Extract and store it somewhere. Navigate into the /bin directory that contains the file "gtkwave.exe". Note down the full path of this executable (like this for example).

In order to be able to run this exe, install Wine using  

brew install --cask --no-quarantine wine@staging. 

Once the install completes, test that Wine works by running wine gtkwave.exe (after navigating to the directory with it in terminal by using the cd command)

Next, in order to set up GTKWave so that it can be used anywhere, run the following command in terminal (once again depending on your profile file) nano ~/.zprofile or nano ~/.bash_profile. This will open a text editor in the terminal. Navigate to the bottom of the file using arrow keys, then paste in the following in a single line 

function gtkwave() { wine "[Full path to gtkwave.exe executable here!]" "$1" &> /dev/null & }

replacing the contents inside the square brackets with the path to the executable as recorded eariler (for example, something like "/Users/username/Desktop/GTKWave/bin/gtkwave.exe"). Control+O to save the file, then Control+X to close it.

Finally, close and reopen terminal to put the changes into effect. Test that running the command, gtkwave, works.