OVM Aware SystemVerilog Editor for Free

The SystemVerilog testbenches are becoming quite complicated in these days. The OVM library were developed to speed up the testbench development process, however effective usage of this library is for digital design engineers without OO background and deep OVM library knowledge quite challenging. To be able to effectively code OVM based testbench the editor with SystemVerilog support and OVM awareness is essential.

Currently the best editor which is also provided for free is a combination of Eclipse IDE (http://www.eclipse.org/) with SVEditor plugin (http://sveditor.sourceforge.net/). Plugin is still in Alpha release however it is quite stable for production usage. The getting started manual introduced you through the project setup. Only after the OVM source files are imported the editor will became a way more effective than classical editors like Vim and Emacs. In addition to Eclipse features it also provides:

1.   Cross linking - Jumping to declaration only by clicking to the type
2.   Outline View - Source code structural view (variables, functions)
3.   Content Assist -  Opens a list of functions/variables which my be called/accessed from specific scope,  instance or structure. Implicitly invoked by "." or "CTRL+SPACE".
4.   Override function - provides list of functions which can be overwritten by specific class.
5.   Hierarchy viewer - Shows class hierarchy
6.   Automatic code indentation - currently not customizable

For the future the editor is going to have a support for templates which would also speed up creating the testbench components. Currently the plugin doesn't solve compilation and test execution from the Eclipse IDE. However this can be easily resolved by executing the external scripts which would compile the code and run it in your favorite simulator.

It may be also beneficial to install VHDL/Verilog plugin to Eclipse to make Eclipse an universal editor for design and verification. I try to find a website which provides such plugins for free and without a restrictions for commercial usage.