Mentor Graphics has announced that its suite of synthesis products support Xilinx Virtex-6 and Spartan-6 Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs).
The company said that support for the new Virtex-6 and Spartan-6 FPGA families is available now in its Graphics Precision RTL and Precision RTL Plus products, providing logic and physical synthesis to implement designs that meet target specifications.
According to Mentor, it is the first EDA synthesis provider to offer physical synthesis support for Virtex-6 and Spartan-6 designs. Its push-button physical synthesis capability works in conjunction with the new Xilinx ISE Design Suite 11.2 to provide Quality-of-Results (QoR).
The company said that designers can also leverage Precision’s SystemVerilog and mixed language support to implement their designs for Virtex-6 and Spartan-6 FPGAs. During the implementation cycle, customers with large designs could reduce run time by utilising Precision’s automatic incremental synthesis and its integration with Xilinx SmartCompile technology.
Daniel Platzker, product line director of Mentor graphics design and synthesis division, said: “Virtex-6 and Spartan-6 FPGAs offer over 200% more logic capacity and greater than 300% increase in register density as compared to previous generations. The latest additions to the Xilinx device portfolio provide faster performance at lower cost and with reduction in power consumption.”
According to Mentor, the Precision Synthesis product line forms the centerpiece of its Graphics FPGA flow. The Precision RTL Plus product offers capabilities such as vendor independent physical synthesis which provides automatic incremental synthesis to reduce the impact of late design cycle changes, and patent-pending functionality which reportedly allows efficient utilisation of architectural blocks.
With support for ASIC prototyping plus implementation and optimisation techniques, such as automatic mapping and inferencing of DSP and RAM blocks, the Precision Synthesis product is claimed to be able to handle high-end FPGAs. In addition, the Precision Synthesis product features a design analysis capability, allowing designers to cross-probe between multiple views as well as to perform interactive static timing for rapid ‘what-if’ analyses.
Tom Feist, senior marketing director for ISE Design Suite at Xilinx, said: “We’re committed to delivering complete, fully integrated design flows with development environments that reflect the way designers work.
“Our collaboration with Mentor Graphics is a key element of this strategy, and ensures a smooth transition for early adopters of our newest device families and targeted design platforms. As a result, our mutual customers can implement their Virtex-6 and Spartan-6 designs faster, while achieving excellent quality-of-results using the Precision-ISE tool flow.”
