When you build a design with BugHunter, it first preparses the HDL source code before it sends it to a simulator for full parsing and compilation. BugHunter’s preparser builds a hierarchical database of the design modules and their contents (e.g. registers, wires, parameters, etc). The preparser performs a “fuzzy” parse, allowing it construct this database even when the parsed HDL code contains minor syntax and grammar errors. One useful benefit of this is that you can navigate IP source code from a third party even before you’ve got a project set up that can correctly compile the IP.

After the preparse is complete and the project window has been populated with the design hierarchy, BugHunter launches the selected simulator which does a full parse of the HDL code to allow the code to be simulated. The errors reported by the simulator are fed back to BugHunter which extracts the information that allows you to click on errors in the error tab to jump to the error location in the source code. Therefore, the exact error messages reported depend on the simulator being used. This means that if you’re not able to understand the error message of a given simulator, you can easily switch to a different simulator and get a different explanation for the error.