Tool allows importing of third-party FPGA cores

The direct importation of FPGA cores generated by third-party applications can now be added to the Altium Designer unified electronic product-development system.

Altium has added support for the direct import of FPGA cores generated by third-party applications to its Altium Designer unified electronic product development system.

This new addition makes the creation and importation of highly optimised, device-specific custom FPGA cores from device vendor tools such as Xilinx's Core Generator and Altera's Megafunction Wizard easy and efficient, and significantly enhances the ability of FPGA developers to take full advantage of the high-level design capabilities of Altium Designer to accelerate system development.

Altium Designer's new FPGA third-party core import wizard eliminates the challenges associated with bringing in third-party cores, which has, up until now, been a complex, multi-step task for developers.

This new time-saving feature guides users through the process and automatically handles the accurate transfer of all the necessary information.

The Wizard intelligently imports the required files, updates the target project structure and gives developers additional options for creating schematic library components or sheet symbols representing the imported core.

This allows developers to simply place the imported FPGA core directly into their design.

"Altium Designer is about giving all engineers the ability to harness the latest in electronics devices to stimulate innovation and accelerate application development" comments Nick Martin, Founder and CEO of Altium.

"By making the process of importing third-party FPGA cores even more open and user-friendly, it broadens the capabilities and expands the reach of the system in a significant way".

"Developers using Altium Designer's vast array of resources to create system functions and accelerate the design process can now save time and effort if they need or choose to use the core generation facilities of the vendor tools".

Altium Designer is an electronic product development system that unifies hardware, software and programmable hardware design within a single design environment.

This system-level unification of electronics design flows allows engineers to make full use of the potential of high-capacity programmable devices as an embedded systems development platform and approach design in an entirely new way.

The 'soft' design methodology enabled by Altium Designer gives engineers the tools to create more intelligent products faster and allows system functionality to remain easily updateable and changeable throughout the development process.

Support for third-party FPGA core import, along with many other system enhancements, is now available with the latest software update for Altium Designer 6 - Altium Designer 6.7.

All Altium Designer 6 license holders can download this update for free.

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