Introduction to Dinotrace

Written by Wilson Snyder <wsnyder@wsnyder.org>, originally by Allan Gallotta.

Summary

Dinotrace is a X-11 waveform viewer which understands Verilog Value Change Dumps, ASCII, and other trace formats. It allows placing cursors, highlighting signals, searching, printing, and other capabilities.

Dinotrace comes with a interface to Emacs which allows source code and log files to be annotated with the values of signals.

Dinotrace is optimized for rapid debugging. With a simple script (vtrace), a simulation failure will automatically place cursors where errors occur, add comments visible in the wave form viewer. Four mouse clicks and the errors will be highlighted in the log files, and the values of signals at the error will be seen in the source.

Dinotrace has a "classic" look and has not received a lot of new changes recently. However it is still in very wide use because it is very solid, and has all of the important features needed for everyday use.

See also

See the buttons at the top of this page, which include:

Dinotrace installation

Dinotrace screenshots

Dinotrace FAQ

Dinotrace documentation

Other Notable Open-Source Viewers

GTKWave - Good waveform viewer using GTK+. Recommended.