If you’re taking an HDL course in your university, the simulation program thats used is probably going to be ModelSim. Mentor Graphics is providing a free student edition of the program, so thats half of the burden gone. The other half of the burden (99.9% if you’re asking me) is getting it to work with wine or crossover or similars. You can of course use a virtual machine, but thats an unwanted annoying overhead. A more straight forward approach is to use open source cross platform alternatives. I used to use vim for code editing, GHDL for generating executable binary code, GTKwave to display waveform data generating by the executable code. Thats a lot of complication to see if a 3 bits register module works, right ?

Dr. Pablo Garrido of Miguel Hernandez University have combined them in a single IDE targeted for VHDL learners. His program is written in java and have a self contained Mac app ready for use. UMHDL relies on a previously installed compiler (ghdl preferably) to compile and build a binary code for simulation. GtkWave wave is used to display the waveform data embedded inside the IDE.

Before using the program, you should have both GHDL and GTKwave installed. You can get the latest version of GHDL here, GTKwave here. UMHDL can be downloaded from Dr. Pedro’s website here, with this little visually pleasing manual.

ps. Don’t forget to read the manual so you know how to setup the IDE to use GHDL and GTKwave.

ps. You could use homebrew to install ghdl if you prefer.