System supports embedded PowerPC processors

Altium has added support for the AMCC 405xx family of embedded PowerPC processors in the latest version of its unified electronic product development system.

Altium has added support for the AMCC 405xx family of embedded PowerPC processors in Altium Designer 6.0, the latest version of its unified electronic product development system.

Altium Designer integrates board- and FPGA-level system development, software development and PCB layout, editing and manufacture within a single, unified application.

When released, Altium Designer broke new ground by making it fast and easy for engineers to develop and debug FPGA-based systems using soft processor cores.

It did this by implementing an interactive design and debug methodology called LiveDesign that allowed designers to interact live with their FPGA design during the development process.

Now, with the recent release of Altium Designer 6.0, LiveDesign has been extended to the development of systems that use a discrete processor, such as the AMCC 405CR PowerPC processor, connected to an FPGA.

This speeds the development of PowerPC systems by allowing engineers to utilise the programmable resources of an FPGA to extend processor functionality and easily implement system components and logic.

"The PowerPC architecture has gained a high degree of popularity within the industry", says Charlie Ashton, Director of Software at AMCC.

"Support for our series of 405-based processors, such as the AMCC 405EP, within Altium Designer 6.0 will allow embedded designers to take advantage of the programmable resources of FPGAs to speed system development, while retaining the performance benefits offered by the PowerPC".

"This opens up completely new and exciting development avenues to system engineers".

To facilitate PowerPC design, Altium Designer includes a special FPGA-based "wrapper" core that provides hardware-level design compatibility with Altium Designer's native cross-device 32bit soft processor - the TSK3000.

The wrapper, implemented inside the FPGA, allows designers to easily switch between the TSK3000 and a discrete PowerPC processor connected to the FPGA with only minimal modification to the hardware design.

Engineers can then take advantage of Altium Designer's range of included FPGA-based peripherals, using the Wishbone OpenBus implementation of the wrapper to connect the peripherals with the processor.

The wrapper core also facilitates the use of Altium Designer's FPGA-based virtual instruments for interactive hardware debugging - LiveDesign.

Similar wrapper cores are already included in Altium Designer to support development for the immersed PowerPC 405 core integrated into Xilinx Virtex-2 Pro FPGAs, the Xilinx MicroBlaze soft processor and discrete ARM processors.

Other wrapper cores targeting additional processors are scheduled for inclusion in future Altium Designer updates.

Altium Designer 6.0 includes a full software tool chain that supports the complete range of PowerPC 405 processor cores.

The software development tools are based on Altium's advanced Viper compiler technology, which is used across all processors supported by the Altium Designer system.

This provides full C-code compatibility between processors, and produces fast, highly-optimised object code.

The provision of both hardware and software compatibility between processors means designers can easily migrate designs between execution platforms.

They can, for example, use the TSK 3000 for initial device-independent system development wholly within an FPGA device, then switch to the AMCC 405xx discrete processor at the prototype stage to take advantage of the special capabilities of these devices whilst retaining the same peripheral configuration in the FPGA.

Discrete processor designs can also be easily migrated to soft processors to minimise component count and lower board-level complexity.

"FPGAs are changing the way engineers think about electronic product development, with very high capacity devices now available at relatively low cost", said Nick Martin, founder and CEO, Altium.

"With Altium Designer 6.0 we've opened up new possibilities by extending our LiveDesign methodology to systems using discrete processors connected to FPGAs".

"This allows FPGA and embedded developers to easily migrate designs from soft processors to take advantage of the high performance available with devices like the PowerPC".

To support the development of discrete PowerPC systems, Altium will be releasing a new daughter board for its unique NanoBoard LiveDesign development board that features an AMCC 405CR MCU embedded processor coupled to a Xilinx Spartan-3 FPGA.

The NanoBoard is a versatile "nano-level breadboard" that integrates with Altium Designer to provide a full LiveDesign implementation and interactive debugging environment for FPGA-based system design.

The NanoBoard features swappable daughterboards that house the target programmable devices and other resources, allowing development for multiple FPGA and processors architectures on the same basic platform.

Release timing for the new daughterboard will be announced shortly.

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