Development system supports soft processor

The latest version of Altera's unified electronic product development system includes full support for embedded designs using the Altera Nios II FPGA-based soft processor.

Altium Designer 6.0, the latest version of the unified electronic product development system, has been enhanced to include full support for embedded designs using the Altera Nios II FPGA-based soft processor.

This allows developers using Altera FPGAs and the Nios II to take full advantage of Altium Designer's unified design environment and LiveDesign methodology to accelerate system development.

"Nios II is gaining popularity as a processing solution and provides a highly optimised platform for embedded design using Altera FPGAs", said Nick Martin, founder and CEO, Altium.

"Altium Designer provides a unified environment for electronic product development and has been specifically designed to allow all engineers to harness the benefits offered by today's large-scale FPGA devices, and facilitate a whole new approach to design moving into the future".

"The addition of Nios II support in Altium Designer 6.0 demonstrates our commitment to bringing the widest range of design options to our customers and allows Nios II developers to take advantage of the design portability and ease of development offered by the system".

Altium Designer provides an FPGA vendor-neutral solution to the development of embedded systems using programmable devices, and provides a number of cross-device soft processor cores that can be implemented in virtually any large-scale FPGA, as well as support for a range of third-party soft and discrete processors.

Within Altium Designer, engineers can move their designs easily between different hardware platforms, targeting soft processors, discrete processors and hybrid FPGA/processor devices.

The addition of Nios II support in Altium Designer 6.0 allows engineers to take advantage of the higher performance and smaller size of the Nios II core when targeting Altera FPGAs, while retaining the benefits of rapid system development and design portability across processors offered by Altium Designer.

To support the Nios II, Altium Designer 6.0 includes a special FPGA-based "wrapper" core that provides hardware-level design compatibility with Altium Designer's native cross-device 32bit processor - the TSK3000.

The wrapper allows designers to easily switch between the Nios II and the TSK3000, or any other soft or hard processor supported by the system, without the need to modify the hardware design.

It also means that engineers using the Nios II can take advantage of Altium Designer's range of included peripherals that use the Wishbone OpenBus interconnect standard to extend processor functionality, and facilitates the use of Altium Designer's FPGA-based virtual instruments for interactive hardware/software debugging - LiveDesign.

As well as the Nios II, Altium Designer includes wrapper cores that target a range of soft and hybrid FPGA/processor devices, and support has recently been added to the system for discrete processors such as those based on the popular ARM cores.

Altium Designer also allows Nios II developers to take advantage of Altium's newly announced unified software/hardware C compiler technology, which is common across all processors supported by the Altium Designer system.

This technology, to be demonstrated at the Embedded Systems Conference, allows selected C-functions to be compiled directly into FPGA hardware, providing an easy and effective way to significantly accelerate applications without the loss of design portability inherent in defining functionality in assembler code.

This provides tremendous flexibility during development and allows crucial system architecture decisions to remain open throughout the design process.

It also facilitates rapid, interactive experimentation with different code execution platform implementations to speed overall system development time.

Altium Designer is the only unified electronic product development system that allows engineers to take a design from concept to completion in a single application.

Altium Designer unifies: board-level design and PCB layout; manufacturing file editing and verification; component information management; device- and vendor-independent programmable logic design; embedded development for FPGA-based systems using soft and discrete processors; and project data and document management.

Altium Designer eliminates the need to purchase and integrate numerous addons at extra cost in order to increase functionality or make up a complete solution.

Support for the Altera Nios II FPGA-based soft processor will be available in Altium Designer 6.0 as part of a software update scheduled for release later in the quarter.

Altium Designer 6.0 is available for purchase through Altium's sales and support centres worldwide.

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