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Your
FPGA vendor gives you a set of design tools free with your subscription.
Your company has an ASIC flow that’s maintained by your internal
CAD group. Your local EDA representative tells you that you really
need vendor-independent tools that cost 5 times the price to get
the most out of your design team, but their biggest competitor is
offering “special edition” tools for 2 milk-carton tops,
a newspaper coupon, and proof of your registration at the Design
Automation Conference…
How do you figure out the best design flow for your FPGA design
project? How much of the available information is hype, and how
much is meaningful? As a project manager, with cost per engineer
running about $200K(US) per year, do you care if your design tool
costs $1K or $100K? Are more expensive tools any better? Do the
vendor’s tools work better on their own technology? Are they
just designed to lock you in so you can’t migrate to another
vendor’s part? How do you justify your decision?
Let’s
look at the options for FPGA design tools. We’ll examine which
tools are in the “required” bucket, which are “nice
to have,” and how to choose the best of each to fit your needs.
First, it helps to have a top-level view of the FPGA design flow
for the type of designs you’re doing. Are you using simple
PLDs for glue logic? Are you designing a 10-million-gate system-on-chip
FPGA with embedded processors and soft IP? Will you retarget your
designs to ASICs or possibly to another vendor’s technology?
All of these factors influence the design tool environment you choose
and can dramatically affect your cost and, more importantly, your
results. In this article, we’ll examine the basic tools you’ll
use for most medium-to-large complexity designs. Future articles
will focus in more detail on specialized tools you’ll need
as you move farther toward the leading edge of FPGA design.
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