FROM
THE EDITOR
This week, we drop in down under to see how Altium is doing a rare thing
in design tool development - using their own products. Altium has always marched to a
different drummer in the EDA industry - a drummer that tells them to make affordable,
desktop, end-to-end electronic design software that can take you through all aspects of
system development from FPGA and board design through embedded software implementation. This
time, they proved their point by using their own software tools to create the accompanying
development board - and improved the product in the process.
Our second new feature is a contributed article from Bruce Riggins of Mentor Graphics
on integrating the design constraints from your board and your FPGA designs. The
flexibility of FPGAs has stirred up the board design process, making the integration and
communication of constraints between the two design domains of paramount importance.
Also this week, we are announcing a new upcoming Journal Webcast on coding techniques
for improved FPGA design, sponsored by Lattice Semiconductor. If you'd like to spruce up
your HDL for better synthesis results, head on over and  register.
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 Structured ASIC Journal
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JOURNAL WEBCASTS
UPCOMING:
"Optimizing Verilog Coding for More Efficient FPGA Synthesis" sponsored by Lattice Semiconductor
Date: Tuesday, September 19, 2006
Time: 11 a.m. Pacific / 2 p.m. Eastern
Duration: 1 hour
Click to register
ON DEMAND:
"Designing 2Gbps Parallel I/O with the LatticeSC FPGA" sponsored by Lattice Semiconductor
 Click to view now
Lattice's new 90nm LatticeSC family -- General introduction, sponsored by Lattice Semiconductor.
 Click to view now
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A Mile in Their Shoes
Altium’s Engineering Empathy
Much of Nick Martin's day is
like the typical workday of any large company CEO.
Nick attends meetings, talks with the press and
analysts about the company's products and
performance, works to drive corporate and product
strategy, and even stops to eat occasionally.
Where Nick's path diverges sharply from the norm
is that you just might also find him sitting in
front of a multi-monitor machine running
Altium Designer (the company's flagship,
end-to-end electronic design software
package), trying to finish up the last details
of a board he's designing. This is not just
some canned, pre-scripted demonstration to
prove that the CEO is in touch with
technology. This is an actual board design
that Altium plans to sell in production
– the NanoBoard-NB2.
At some level, the business of
running any big international corporation is
largely the same. In high technology, however, the
mundanity of macromanaging a large organization
often insulates executives from the actual
technology challenges faced by both their
customers and their own engineers. At Altium,
they do things a little differently. Nick is an
electronics engineer at heart, and his company
provides design automation software aimed at
helping the average working engineer get his job
done better and faster. In order to accomplish
that goal, Nick feels that everyone working to
deliver that capability, himself included, needs
to walk a mile in the shoes of the engineer using
their products. That is why, when the company
needed a new development board to go with the
latest version of Altium Designer, they chose to
do the design themselves, using their own
software. [more]
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Integrating PCB and FPGA Constraints
by Bruce Riggins, Mentor Graphics Corporation
A product’s success is in large
part a direct result of how well, relative to the target
market, the product is constrained. Manufacturing costs,
ergonomics, reliability, retail price, usability, power
requirements – all of these factors (among a host of
others) are in one way or another a constraint on the
finished product. From an electrical engineering
perspective, additional, more specific constraints have
to be dealt with: bus latency, bandwidth, data processing
needs, component costs and availability, power
consumption, etc.
In their attempts to create a product
that meets the needs of the market, engineers must make
hundreds of tradeoffs before committing to a final
architecture. When FPGAs (or ASICs, but for the purpose of
this article, FPGAs) figure into that architecture, one
of the initial design-level issues that must be dealt
with is how to properly constrain both the FPGA and the
PCB. Board-level demands (constraints) must consider the
capabilities of the FPGA; conversely, the FPGA must be
carefully selected in order to meet the needs of the
overall system. Tying these together requires a
system-wide view of constraints. [more]
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