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Xilinx Foundation Series Delivers Clearly Superior Synthesis


Synthesis Results 
VHDL or Verilog Coverage  
Ease of Use 
Optimization and Utilization
Software Solutions 
Alliance Series  
Foundation Series

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: AvnetInternet LinkInsightInternet Link, and Nu HorizonsInternet Link