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 ExpressThe 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:
Competitor's Synthesis FailuresThe 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 SupportFoundation 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 UseWith 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 UtilizationXilinx 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 LineAs 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.
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