CURRENT FEATURE ARTICLES

FPGAs at DAC
Programmable Logic Powers Verification
Lattice Leaps Forward
90nm XP2 a Fit Sequel
FPGA Packaging and Signal Integrity
A Connectivity Perspective
Merging Lanes
Will FPGAs Re-converge?
Beyond the Go Button
Taking More Control of FPGA Design
Serial Commodotization
Altera Arria GX
It Isn’t Easy Being Green
Weee Review RoHS Basics
The Value of a Complete FPGA Design Flow
by Tom Dewey, Mentor Graphics

JOURNAL WEBCASTS

FPGAs at DAC
Programmable Logic Powers Verification

This week, at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) in San Diego, FPGA tool specialists Synplicity announced the acquisition of the Swedish company Hardi Electronics – supplier of FPGA-based prototyping boards.  Why is this interesting?  It gives us a number of insights into the increasing role of FPGAs in system-level verification, the complex nature of the tools market for FPGAs, and the volatility of the EDA business in general.

FPGAs have long been used as prototyping vehicles for ASIC designs, ASSP designs, board-based system designs, and of course for FPGA-based designs.  As a long-time leading vendor of FPGA synthesis technology, it made sense for Synplicity to capitalize on the prototyping trend by providing tools to support the use of FPGAs as prototyping vehicles.  For years now, the company’s “Certify” product line has been a standard for partitioning and re-purposing RTL code intended for ASIC implementation into multi-FPGA prototypes.  Even though VHDL and Verilog are generic, the architectures created for ASIC-bound designs contain constructs that are not friendly to FPGA realization.  Certify takes those ASIC-isms out of the code, partitions large designs across multiple FPGA devices (including generating interfaces between the FPGAs), and makes versions of the code suitable for synthesis into FPGA-based prototypes.  [more]