Software accelerates FPGA design

Integrated Software Environment design suite is optimised to address today's leading design challenges: timing closure, productivity and power.

Xilinx has introduced its latest 9.1i release of the industry's most widely used Xilinx Integrated Software Environment (ISE) design suite optimised to address today's leading design challenges: timing closure, productivity and power.

In addition to 2.5x faster runtimes, ISE 9.1i includes new SmartCompile technology which improves run times by up to an additional 6x while maintaining exact design preservation of unchanged logic.

ISE 9.1i optimises the unique ExpressFabric technology of its latest 65nm Virtex-5 platform, providing an average of 30% faster performance than competing solutions.

For power sensitive applications, ISE 9.1i also reduces dynamic power by an average of 10%.

This revolutionary technology is facilitated by the efforts of the Xilinx-Synplicity Ultra High-Capacity Timing Closure Task Force, delivering industry-leading productivity enhancing capabilities to ensure the fastest path to timing closure and optimise the power and performance of leading-edge Xilinx Virtex Series and Spartan-3 Generation FPGAs.

"Fast implementation runtimes and predictable timing results for small design changes, especially towards the end of a design cycle, are extremely important", said Jochen Frensch, Senior Technical Expert, Graphics Platform, at Harmon/Becker Automotive Systems, a leading provider of customised automotive systems.

"For small design changes, XST synthesis preserved names for unchanged parts of the design and SmartGuide preserved close to 99% of the components in implementation, enabling us to see faster incremental runtimes".

"The new SmartGuide technology in ISE 9.1i offers a tremendous advantage".

Much of the time spent on today's most advanced designs is in re-implementing the entire design with each incremental change.

These re-implementations take time and introduce the risk of disrupting portions of the design not directly involved with the change.

Xilinx SmartCompile technology addresses these issues with the following technologies.

Partition: minimise effects of minor changes late in design cycles with cut-and-paste functionality that automatically provides exact preservation of existing synthesis, placement and routing of unchanged partitions, and reduces time for reimplementation by an average of 2.5x.

SmartGuide reduces time for re-implementation by an average of 2x for small changes by leveraging prior implementation results.

SmartPreview enables users to pause and resume the place-and-route process and save intermediate results to evaluate the state of their designs.

By previewing implementation information such as routing status and timing results, users can make important trade-off decisions without waiting for complete implementation to complete.

SmartCompile technology delivers an order of magnitude increase in productivity as a result of up to a 6x run time improvement, exact preservation of partitions, and improved visibility into the implementation.

These improvements are in addition to the 2.5x faster runtimes for challenging designs.

ISE 9.1i also addresses the increasing sophistication of FPGA designers with a number of user interface enhancements including: a Tcl command console to easily transition from the ISE graphical user interface to a command line environment; and a source code control compatibility function that identifies the files necessary to recreate results, which can be imported and exported for source control.

New features in ISE 9.1i design tools build on capabilities of ISE Fmax technology, especially designed to deliver unparalleled performance and timing closure results for high density, high performance Virtex-5 based designs.

The ISE 9.1i integrated timing closure flow incorporates enhanced physical synthesis optimisations that provide higher quality of results.

Optimised routing algorithms provide the most efficient utilisation of the diagonally symmetric interconnect of the 65nm ExpressFabric technology to minimise delay and fully leverage the high performance features of the Virtex-5 platform.

"Timing closure is the number one issue for FPGA designers, and this release greatly simplifies and accelerates that process", said Bruce Talley, Vice President of the Design Software Division at Xilinx.

"Our ISE SmartCompile technology addresses the top challenges facing designers today, allowing designers to reach their performance goals in much less time with fewer, more efficient design iterations".

"What is just as compelling to our users is that ISE 9.1i also enables them to optimise for low power design requirements without compromises in overall performance".

Underlying the entire ISE 9.1i infrastructure is an expanded timing closure environment - a virtual "timing closure cockpit" - that enables intuitive cross-probing between constraint entry, timing analysis, floorplanning and report views so designers can more easily analyse timing problems.

The ISE 9.1i integrated timing closure flow incorporates enhanced physical synthesis with improved timing correlation between synthesis and placement, resulting in higher quality of results.

New power optimisation in Xilinx Synthesis Technology (XST) and placement together with improvements in routing deliver an average of 10% lower dynamic power for Spartan-3 Series FPGAs.

XST provides power-aware logic optimisations for macro processing on blocks such as multipliers, adders and BRAMs.

Implementation algorithms deploy power-efficient placement strategies and lower capacitance nets within the device to minimise power without sacrificing performance.

ISE Foundation 9.1i suite is immediately available with prices starting at US $2495.

A full-featured 60-day evaluation version is available at no charge.

All versions of ISE 9.1i software packages support Windows 2000 and Windows XP Professional and Linux Red Hat Enterprise 3.0 and 4.0.

ISE Foundation also supports Solaris 2.8 and 2.9.

Back to top