Foundation Series 1.4 Includes Latest Version of Synopsys FPGA Express
The latest Foundation Series software solution includes the powerful Synopsys
FPGA Express technology. This brings to Foundation customers complete support
for VHDL and Verilog. Recently, it was compared to a competitor's "HDL
for free" solution. This benchmark study with the competitor's product
revealed the following:
-
The competitor's HDL synthesis failed on 73% of the designs in the test
suite.
-
The competitor's synthesis has huge deficiencies in support of VHDL and
Verilog constructs.
-
The competitor's HDL design environment lacks the usability required by
serious designers and is even inappropriate as a training vehicle.
-
On average (for designs that went through), the competitor's software requires
significantly more logic cells than the Foundation Series.
Competitor's Synthesis Failures
The benchmark suite consisted of 80 working, customer written VHDL and
Verilog designs. Of the 80 designs, only 22 passed through the competitor's
proprietary synthesis. Of these 22 designs, nine required debugging
and workarounds to problems before they would synthesize. Overall, 73%
of the benchmark suite would not run through the competitor's software.
Failures occurred in different areas of synthesis and can be categorized
as follows:
Competitor's Proprietary HDL is Deficient in Standard
VHDL and Verilog Support
Foundation Express's standards based approach for language support is an
absolute for handling design complexity and providing design portability.
Almost half (46%) of the failed designs for the competitor's software are
a result of unsupported language constructs. In their HDL manuals, the
competitor states that complete VHDL and Verilog language support involves
nearly 300 IEEE standard constructs, yet they concede that less than 66%
of these constructs are supported in their software.
Foundation Express Delivers Superior Ease of Use
With the Foundation Express HDL-centric solution, designers can easily
make design changes during development. Features such as independent
compilation and testing of different levels of HDL hierarchy, simple additions
of new HDL libraries, and the ability to write entities and modules without
filename restriction make for a more productive and intuitive design environment.
The competitor's HDL fails the ease of use test with time consuming and
tedious processes for changing and adding to an existing design.
Foundation Express Provides Better Optimization
and Utilization
Xilinx Foundation Express integrates architectural optimization into its
synthesis. This results in a more efficient use of device area.
In contrast, the competitor's proprietary synthesis does not perform architectural
optimization until implementation, causing its fitter/place-and-route tools
to do all the optimization. Preliminary benchmark results show that
the Foundation Series utilizes significantly fewer logic cells than the
competitor's software for small and medium sized designs. This means the
competitor's software will require bigger, faster, and more expensive
parts.
A robust synthesis tool will optimize language constructs to its target
device's internal features as well as provide alternatives to architectural
limitations. 17% of the the competitor's synthesis errors resulted in compiler
failure rather than translating such common hardware features as bi-directional
IO and tri-state buffers to alternate logic.
The Bottom Line
As programmable logic device densities are increasing, the requirement
for reliable, full-featured VHDL and Verilog language support is paramount.
The HDL analyzer in Foundation Express is the same technology found in
Synopsys's leading Design Compiler products for ASIC design. This
proven technology provides robust language feature support, support
for varying coding styles, and high-level optimization features.
With the competitor's "HDL for Free" solution, you get a proprietary
synthesis solution which is even marginal for training purposes.
Or, you get what you pay for.
To learn more about the Xilinx Foundation Series or receive an evaluation
copy, please contact your local sales office
or authorized distributor now. In North America, Xilinx franchised distributors
are: Avnet ,
Insight, and Nu
Horizons. |
Synthesis
Results