FROM
THE EDITOR
This week, our "Free
Tool Friday" feature
takes a closer look at the incredible amount of design tool technology
you can get for very low prices from your favorite FPGA vendor.
While the quality of FPGA vendor tools is improving every day,
there’s still a growing market for commercial EDA software
for FPGAs. With such high-performance design software available
for peanuts, when does it make sense to pay for an upgrade?
Thanks
for reading! If
there's anything we can do to make our publications
more useful to you, please let us know at: comments@fpgajournal.com
Kevin
Morris – Editor
FPGA and Programmable Logic Journal
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CURRENT
FEATURE ARTICLES
Free
Tool Friday
How Good are FPGA Vendor Tools?
Deeply Embedded
ESC 2005 - the FPGA View
Two Bucks
Xilinx Introduces Spartan-3E
Plug and Play Design Methodologies for FPGA-based Signal Processing
by Narinder Lall, Xilinx, Inc.
and
Eric Cigan, AccelChip, Inc.
Lattice
Launches XP
Non-Volatility at the Forefront of FPGA
High-Density FPGA-to-ASIC
Conversions using Structured ASIC: Fills the Gap
by Rick Mosher and Bob Kirk, AMI Semiconductor, Inc.
Breakthrough
Bandwidth
SerDes Hits New Heights
Making the Jump to 10G
by Abhijit Athavale
and Brian Seemann, Xilinx, Inc.
Co-Verification Methodology
for Platform FPGAs
by Milan Saini, Xilinx, Inc.
and Ross Nelson, Mentor Graphics
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Free Tool Friday
How Good are FPGA Vendor Tools?
What can you get for free? In
this age of rapid technological evolution, it is not uncommon
for valuable, cutting-edge technology to find its way into the "free cell phone" category.
In an effort to market their wares, technology companies often
find themselves offering high-value products at little or no cost
in order to remove barriers to adoption of their principal products.
Such is the case with design tools for FPGA. Most FPGA vendors
offer sophisticated tool suites, either by free download or at
an extremely low cost, in order to entice new designers to check
out their chips and to pave the way for them to design their devices
into new sockets.
Whether the tools are completely free or just very inexpensive
is a matter for frivolous debate. Some vendors offer their best
tools for free, but charge for support for their most expensive
devices. Others offer limited capability tools for free and charge
for increased capability. Either way, compared with other electronic
design disciplines, you will spend a trivial percentage of your
design budget on tools, while enjoying some of the best design
automation capability available.
Let's say you're running an FPGA company that sells hundreds of
millions of dollars worth of silicon every year. You have a great
set of silicon offerings, but there are barriers between you and
your customers. Anyone designing anything using that silicon has
to use a suite of sophisticated EDA tools including (at least)
simulation, synthesis, and place-and-route. Simulation is not a
problem, since there's a thriving HDL simulation industry supported
by the ASIC community that produces accessible, cost-effective
tools. On the other end of the spectrum, place-and-route tools
are tightly connected to your FPGA silicon architecture. As an
FPGA vendor, you almost certainly need to develop and distribute
tools those yourself. [more]
ANNOUNCEMENTS
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View this online seminar and learn how to design
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