Responding to the need for tools which help deal with increasing fpga design complexity, Mentor Graphics has launched Precision RTL Plus Synthesis, said to bring a better way of designing fpgas. The tool is also said to increase designer productivity ‘dramatically’.
According to Mentor, the tool provides designers, regardless of their level of expertise, with the ability to reach timing closure faster, minimise the impact of late design changes and to make efficient use of fpga architectural blocks.
Valerie Rachko, director of outbound fpga synthesis marketing with Mentor’s design creation and synthesis division, noted: “It’s the only tool on the market to support four vendors and 19 fpga families.”
The software offers three capabilities: multivendor physically aware synthesis; incremental synthesis; and resource management technology for optimised design performance.
Multivendor support means designers can reach their timing goals more quickly. “New devices have many dedicated blocks,” Rachko noted, “but it is arbitrary how logic is implemented. The netlist output knows the device targeted and its resources. It knows the design rules and estimates where the logic will end up. It then optimises the design to improve interconnect and so on. The result is an optimised netlist which is fed into the vendor’s place and route tool.” Performance improvements of up to 40% are claimed.
Incremental synthesis brings a runtime improvement of up to 60%, whilst the resource management features support partition based synthesis, allowing designers to recompile and synthesise only the partition affected by design changes.
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