Icarus Verilog Extensions

Icarus Verilog supports certain extensions to the baseline IEEE 1364 standard. Some of these are picked from extended variants of the language, such as SystemVerilog, and some are expressions of internal behavior of Icarus Verilog, made available as a tool debugging aid.

Built-in System Functions

Extended Verilog Data Types

This feature is turned on by the generation flag “-gxtypes” and turned off by the generation flag “-gno-xtypes”. It is turned on by default.

Icarus Verilog adds support for extended data types. This extended type syntax is based on a proposal by Cadence Design Systems, originally as an update to the IEEE 1364 standard. Icarus Verilog currently only takes the new primitive types from the proposal.

SystemVerilog provides the same functionality using somewhat different syntax. This extension is maintained for backwards compatibility.

• Types

Extended data types separates the concept of net/variable from the data type. Both nets and variables can declared with any data type. The primitive types available are:

logic  - The familiar 0, 1, x and z, optionally with strength.
bool   - Limited to only 0 and 1
real   - 64-bit real values

Nets with logic type may have multiple drivers with strength, and the value is resolved the usual way. Only logic values may be driven to logic nets, so bool values driven onto logic nets are implicitly converted to logic.

Nets with any other type may not have multiple drivers. The compiler should detect the multiple drivers and report an error.

• Declarations

The declaration of a net is extended to include the type of the wire, with the syntax:

wire <type> <wire-assignment-list>... ;

The <type>, if omitted, is taken to be logic. The “wire” can be any of the net keywords. Wires can be logic, bool, real, or vectors of logic or bool. Some valid examples:

wire real foo = 1.0;
tri logic bus[31:0];
wire bool addr[23:0];
... and so on.

The declarations of variables is similar. The “reg” keyword is used to specify that this is a variable. Variables can have the same data types as nets.

• Ports

Module and task ports in standard Verilog are restricted to logic types. This extension removes that restriction, allowing any of the above types to pass through the port consistent with the continuous assignment connectivity that is implied by the type.

• Expressions

Expressions in the face of real values is covered by the baseline Verilog standard.

The bool type supports the same operators as the logic type, with the obvious differences imposed by the limited domain.

Comparison operators (not case compare) return logic if either of their operands is logic. If both are bool or real (including mix of bool and real) then the result is bool. This is because comparison of bools and reals always return exactly true or false.

Case comparison returns bool. This differs from baseline Verilog, which strictly speaking returns a logic, but only 0 or 1 values.

Arithmetic operators return real if either of their operands is real, otherwise they return logic if either of their operands is logic. If both operands are bool, they return bool.