Date: 17/09/2010

New design tool from National Semiconductor to optimize power supply for FPGAs

National Semiconductor has released the WEBENCH FPGA Power Architect to model and optimize power supplies for FPGAs in very fast.

The WEBENCH FPGA Power Architect incorporates the detailed supply requirements of over130 of the latest FPGA devices from Altera Corp. and Xilinx, Inc. Modern power supply systems such as advanced FPGAs often incorporating multiple loads to drive specified voltages. The WEBENCH power supply designs incorporate the power requirements published by the FPGA manufacturers, which can meet specific limitations for ripple, noise filtering, synchronization and separation of supplies and start up definitions (soft start).

"Xilinx has made a considerable investment in simplifying the power supply requirements and the power distribution system requirements for our FPGAs," said Jameel Hussein, technical marketing manager for Power and Configuration Solutions at Xilinx. "With the help of National Semiconductor's WEBENCH FPGA Power Architect, design workload is further reduced to allow the customer to get to market faster and save cost on board-spins and debugging."

To design using WEBENCH FPGA Power Architect the designer selects a FPGA from Altera or Xilinx and the tool automatically populates the power requirements, identifying core and I/O options for every potential load of that array. Once tuned by the designer, WEBENCH collects all the loads and creates multiple power supply architectures as options for driving the FPGA and the total system.

"A real system always includes much more than just the FPGA. We are making it easy for designers to quickly model their complete system power needs and include the unique requirements of their FPGA with confidence," said Phil Gibson, vice president of Technical Sales Tools at National Semiconductor. "We are helping them avoid mistakes and save countless hours of research and development time."

The power supply may involve one or more intermediate voltage rails between the input supply and the point-of-load regulators. The designer can tune the power supply with the turn of a dial, reducing size, increasing efficiency or lowering complete system cost. The designer can also order components for prototyping, share the complete system with others, or easily print a complete project report including schematics, bill of materials (BOM) and performance characteristics.

The WEBENCH Designer tools from National Semiconductor are a collection of software algorithms and visual interfaces that aim to deliver easy designs for power, lighting, and sensing applications.