The cocotb project is proud to announce the immediate release of cocotb 1.9. Backwards-compatible to all prior 1.x versions of cocotb, this release brings a large amount of quality-of-life improvements to our users and prepares them for the upcoming major release of cocotb 2.0.

Improved simulator support

A key area of improvement in cocotb 1.9 is simulator support. For the first time, the open source NVC VHDL simulator is now fully supported. Users of Cadence Xcelium will be happy to know that designs with VHDL toplevels working with cocotb. And finally, Verilator has once again added more functionality to its VPI interface (which is used to connect cocotb and the simulator), and cocotb can directly benefit from that.

Additionally, cocotb 1.9 includes a number of improvements to the simulator Makefiles and cocotb runner.

Get ready for cocotb 2.0

In parallel to this release, cocotb contributors are busy preparing for cocotb 2.0. As a major release, cocotb 2.0 will contain breaking changes compared to the 1.x release series in order to iron out some long-standing quirks that accumulated over time. To simplify the migration to this upcoming version as much as possible, cocotb 1.9 adds syntax alternatives that will be used in cocotb 2.0 and warns about deprecated syntax. Users are encouraged to run their testbenches with cocotb 1.9 and fix all deprecation warnings at their leisure, which will put them into the pole position once cocotb 2.0 is released.

So much more!

A much more detailed description of all changes in this first 1.9 release can be found in the release notes.

Cocotb is a community project under the umbrella of the FOSSi Foundation. Thanks to all sponsors of the FOSSi Foundation the cocotb project can make use of a continuous integration system which runs proprietary simulators in a compliant way. We are thankful for the great partnerships we have with Aldec, Cadence, and Siemens, which provide us with simulator licences and support to ensure an excellent integration between these simulators and cocotb.

Please reach out to Philipp at philipp@fossi-foundation.org if you or your company want to support cocotb, either financially to help pay for costs such as running our continuous integration setup, or with in-kind donations, such as simulator licenses.

To close this release announcement, here are some statistics:

  • 126 files changed, 2721 insertions(+), 782 deletions(-)
  • 153 commits
  • 21 code contributors

These numbers are impressive and showcase the power of the free and open source collaboration model. To be able to sustain this amount of change and the high-quality review process behind it we are happy to have an active group of maintainers caring for cocotb and its users. Thank you, and thanks to the whole cocotb community for coming together to create this unique piece of software.

If you have questions or issues with this release head over to the issue tracker or open a GitHub discussion.