mgray
Newbie level 3
After hearing FPGA user friends complain about how hard it is to choose FPGAs/CPLDs for an application when there are so many different devices out there, a buddy and I sat down and wrote a script to batch send a design in HDL code to ISE and QuartusII software. (Due to time constraints, we didn't include Actel and Lattice tools)
Essentially inputs: HDL code and constraints, outputs: synthesis & place-and-route statistics for 600+ FPGAs/CPLDs.
Takes some time to run, but when it's done, the script selects the best results (highest Fmax, lowest power dissipation etc.) and shows them to the folks who complained.
They seem to like this little helper script a lot, so we're thinking of adding more to it and turning into something more substantial. If this kind of functionality is good, maybe we can provide it to other FPGA users or even create a sort of "generic" FPGA tool wrapper with it!
However we are clueless about what other people might find helpful, so if you think this script might be helpful, please let me know.
If you have a feature wish or gripe about using FPGAs, I'd love to hear more about it.
Seems like it's hard to get information about FPGAs that's standardised and portable across vendors...
Thanks!
Essentially inputs: HDL code and constraints, outputs: synthesis & place-and-route statistics for 600+ FPGAs/CPLDs.
Takes some time to run, but when it's done, the script selects the best results (highest Fmax, lowest power dissipation etc.) and shows them to the folks who complained.
They seem to like this little helper script a lot, so we're thinking of adding more to it and turning into something more substantial. If this kind of functionality is good, maybe we can provide it to other FPGA users or even create a sort of "generic" FPGA tool wrapper with it!
However we are clueless about what other people might find helpful, so if you think this script might be helpful, please let me know.
If you have a feature wish or gripe about using FPGAs, I'd love to hear more about it.
Seems like it's hard to get information about FPGAs that's standardised and portable across vendors...
Thanks!