FROM THE EDITOR
This week, our "Free
Tool Friday" feature takes a closer look at the incredible
amount of design tool technology you can get for very low prices
from your favorite FPGA vendor. While the quality of FPGA vendor
tools is improving every day, there’s still a growing market for
commercial EDA software for FPGAs. With such high-performance design
software available for peanuts, when does it make sense to pay for
an upgrade?
Thanks for reading! If there's
anything we can do to make our publications more useful to you,
please let us know at: comments@fpgajournal.com
Kevin Morris –
Editor
FPGA and Programmable Logic
Journal |
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CURRENT FEATURE
ARTICLES
Free
Tool Friday
How Good are FPGA Vendor Tools?
Deeply
Embedded
ESC 2005 - the FPGA View
Two
Bucks
Xilinx Introduces Spartan-3E
Plug
and Play Design Methodologies for FPGA-based Signal
Processing
by Narinder Lall, Xilinx, Inc. and
Eric Cigan, AccelChip, Inc.
Lattice
Launches XP
Non-Volatility at the
Forefront of FPGA
High-Density
FPGA-to-ASIC Conversions using Structured ASIC: Fills the Gap
by Rick Mosher and Bob Kirk, AMI Semiconductor,
Inc.
Breakthrough
Bandwidth
SerDes Hits New
Heights
Making
the Jump to 10G
by Abhijit Athavale and Brian
Seemann, Xilinx, Inc.
Co-Verification
Methodology for Platform FPGAs
by
Milan Saini, Xilinx, Inc.
and Ross Nelson, Mentor
Graphics
|
Free Tool Friday
How Good
are FPGA Vendor Tools?
What can you get for free? In this age of rapid
technological evolution, it is not uncommon for valuable, cutting-edge
technology to find its way into the "free cell phone" category. In an
effort to market their wares, technology companies often find themselves
offering high-value products at little or no cost in order to remove
barriers to adoption of their principal products. Such is the case with
design tools for FPGA. Most FPGA vendors offer sophisticated tool suites,
either by free download or at an extremely low cost, in order to entice
new designers to check out their chips and to pave the way for them to
design their devices into new sockets.
Whether the tools are completely free or just very
inexpensive is a matter for frivolous debate. Some vendors offer their
best tools for free, but charge for support for their most expensive
devices. Others offer limited capability tools for free and charge for
increased capability. Either way, compared with other electronic design
disciplines, you will spend a trivial percentage of your design budget on
tools, while enjoying some of the best design automation capability
available.
Let's say you're running an FPGA company that sells
hundreds of millions of dollars worth of silicon every year. You have a
great set of silicon offerings, but there are barriers between you and
your customers. Anyone designing anything using that silicon has to use a
suite of sophisticated EDA tools including (at least) simulation,
synthesis, and place-and-route. Simulation is not a problem, since there's
a thriving HDL simulation industry supported by the ASIC community that
produces accessible, cost-effective tools. On the other end of the
spectrum, place-and-route tools are tightly connected to your FPGA silicon
architecture. As an FPGA vendor, you almost certainly need to develop and
distribute tools those yourself. [more]
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