What's new in EASE™ 9.6

Meta nets/ports in block diagrams

When you have many ports on entities the diagrams get more difficult to read due to the many signals crossing. The use of ‘Meta’ ports and nets is a solution to this problem. A ‘Meta’ port represents a number of ports on a block or on the diagram. Likewise a ‘Meta’ net represents a number of signals in a diagram.

A meta port is created by merging 1 or more component or diagram ports into a meta port using the context menu of a port.
A meta net is created merging multiple nets in to a meta net or by starting a wiring action at a meta port.

Besides reducing the visible diagram complexity the new Meta port and net functionality offers the possibility of complex port maps in which you can:
• concatenate signals
• associate individual record and array elements

Meta net – port connectivity

A meta port can only be connected to a meta net. A meta net can be connected to both meta ports and ‘normal’ ports. When multiple signals are connected to a single port connection properties must be defined to create the intended portmap. How the signals inside a meta net connect to the ports is controlled in the meta connections properties dialog. The dialog offers additional functionality besides connecting port items to signals through its context menus. Different context menus are available in the Signals and Ports windows.
They allow you to:

Adding signals to the meta net by copying port data.
Deleting meta net signals
Add ports to a meta port
Delete ports

VHDL-2019 mode view support

The VHDL-2019 standard allows you to define a ‘view’ on a record type. A view assigns a direction to each signal in the record. The view definition can then be used as mode indicator on an entity port.

Below is an example for a simple memory interface with 5 signals. The record and its views have been defined in a package.

  type t_ram is record
    address : STD_LOGIC_VECTOR(15 downto 0);
    enable  : STD_LOGIC;
    toStore : STD_LOGIC_VECTOR(7 downto 0);
    value   : STD_LOGIC_VECTOR(7 downto 0);
    write   : STD_LOGIC;
  end record; -- t_ram

  view vRamIn of t_ram is
      toStore   : in;
      value     : out;
      address   : in;
      enable    : in;
      write     : in;
  end view vRamIn;

  alias vRamOut is vRamIn'converse;

A second advantage is that the use of views reduces the size of the instance port map. An additional advantage is that when the interface between the entities needs to be adjusted this can done by just changing the type and view definitions.

The diagram image on above shows the regular signal interconnect, while the diagram below uses a record view to reduce the amount of visible interconnect.

The only disadvantage of using views is that views are not yet supported by all EDA tool vendors.

Improved application font support

In the User preference dialog, Application page, you can select both a fixed-pitch font and a proportional font (type face and font size) which are used where applicable.

Deprecated features

The TIFF image file format is no longer supported (image on diagram, export image to file).

Other improvements

Id 2254: Added KDE/GNOME .desktop files on Linux.
Id 2348: also restore HDL files after an undo/redo action.
Id 2338: allow (forced) change of net name even if it causes a conflict.
Id 2315: Improved HDL import dialog, added option to create relative paths.
Id 2316: Improved completer in line-edit widget inside dialogs by removing all non-matching entries from the list.
Id 2356: VHDL linter (Misc6) now checks if component instantiation port map is complete if record elements are connected individually.
New VHDL lint check (Misc19): check if signal initial value is constant.
Both Verilog and VHDL import now support more complex expressions in the port map.
Expressions are supported as long as they refer to only one port/signal.
Fixed messages about calls to impure functions from pure functions in standard packages when importing VHDL.
Removed Sensitivity column from the port table in property dialog of Concurrent statements, Verilog specify and initial block
Fixed navigation (search, hot-error, ...) to an un-routed net.
After rotating a block the ports were not always on the block boundary.
Using Subversion 1.14.5 with OpenSSL 3.0.14
Using TCL version 8.6.16