Date: 13/03/2011

Tools from Synopsys and Mentor for Xilinx' FPGA design synthesis

Leading VLSI chip design software vendors Mentor Graphics and Synopsys have announced new FPGA Synthesis tools/solutions for Xilinx's Newest ISE Design Suite, mainly targeting the newly released 28nm 7-series FPGAs from Xilinx. These million gate density FPGA from Xilinx need powerful eda tools to get the maximum performance out of the silicon.

Mentor Graphics Corporation has announced its latest FPGA synthesis tools for Xilinx 28nm 7 series field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). Support for the new 28nm Virtex-7 and Kintex-7 FPGA families is available now and support for Artix-7 will follow. Mentor Graphics claims it is the first EDA FPGA synthesis provider to offer physical synthesis support for Virtex-7 and Kintex-7 FPGA designs.

Mentor says the push-button capabilities of the Precision tool works in conjunction with the new Xilinx ISE Design Suite 13 to provide superior Quality-of-Results (QoR). Designers can also leverage the Precision tool's support for industry-leading SystemVerilog and mixed language support to implement their designs. During the implementation cycle, customers with large designs can reduce run time by utilizing the Precision tool's unique automatic incremental synthesis and its integration with Xilinx SmartCompile, adds Mentor.

Synopsys has announced its new Synplify Pro, Synplify Premier and Synphony synthesis support for Xilinx's latest ISE Design Suite (IDS) 13, which provides support for their 28-nanometer (nm) 7 series FPGAs. Synopsys says its advanced FPGA synthesis tools include a hierarchical project manager that enables team-design collaboration with a mixed bottom-up/top-down approach that is highly integrated with Xilinx's SmartGuide incremental place & route (P&R) technology, delivering faster RTL-to-board implementation.

The combination of Synphony high-level synthesis, Synplify Pro and Synplify Premier software creates the FPGA design by saving the engineer from RTL coding time when designing with millions of gates. This set of FPGA specific tools offer features such as technology characterization, constraint generation for multi-rate, multi-clock implementations, and support for advanced device hardware such as multipliers, DSP units and memories.

The advantages of Synplify Pro and Synplify Premier design tools include faster runtime enabling up to 4X faster runtimes than normal logic synthesis, and when combined with multiprocessing, can achieve up to 10X faster runtimes as claimed by Synopsys. When used for FPGA-based prototyping projects, Synplify Premier software automatically converts the gated clocks, generated clocks and tri-states present in many ASIC designs into the target FPGA, making RTL code changes unnecessary. Synplify Premier software also includes extensive SystemVerilog language support and native support for DesignWare IP, which allows the same IP code used in the design to be available within the FPGA-based prototype.

Due to the close collaboration between Synopsys and Xilinx the tools for the programmable silicon deliver a jointly developed Design Preservation flow, allowing users to iterate on targeted portions of the design while maintaining the performance of pre-implemented, pre-verified design blocks. The Synplify Pro software's integration with the Xilinx Embedded Design Kit (EDK) makes it easy for MicroBlaze processor users to include EDK generated components in their Synplify project, stated in the release.

Synplify Pro, Synplify Premier and Synphony software support for Xilinx's latest ISE Design Suite 13, including support for their 28-nm 7 series FPGAs, is available now.

To learn more about Mentor's FPGA synthesis tools visit: http://www.mentor.com/products/fpga/synthesis/
For more information on Synopsys' FPGA Implementation products visit
http://www.synopsys.com/fpga.
For more information on Xilinx's 7 series FPGAs, please
visit http://www.xilinx.com/7-series-fpgas.htm