How to speed up Xilinx ISE processing?

[uckingcu]

Hi,
I have my project folder on a network hard drive and running ise on my local machine, does this slower the speed of ise?

I have a big design and to make an image,it is taking almost 10hrs to complete. I am using core2duo with 3G ram. can anyone tell me does getting better system will speed up things? can you provide any specs for the machine.

Thank you

 

[echo47]

xilinx ise

Please clarify "make an image". Do you mean synthesize, place & route, generate bitstream?

Your network is probably not a significant factor. I run ISE 8.2i on my local drive, and I notice that it spends almost all of its time crunching stuff in RAM, not accessing files.

However, if you run out of RAM and start swapping, that would be horribly slow. Your 3GB RAM is probably plenty, but check your memory monitor to be sure.

Once upon a time, I had a XC2V6000 design (with no floorplanning) that was taking a couple of hours to place and route, and it had trouble meeting timing. PAR was struggling to route the whole project as one entity, and the results in FPGA Editor looked like a bowl of spaghetti. I simply added a few LOC constraints to divide the major HDL modules into separate areas of the chip, and then it completed in 45 minutes with no timing difficulties. (The system was a dual 1.4 GHz Athlon with 1GB of RAM, running Windows and ISE 6.3i.)

What type FPGA and which version ISE are you using?

 

[uckingcu]

Re: xilinx ise

I am using virtex4 fx device with 4 rocket IO's. Image file i mentioned is the bitstream.

 

[echo47]

xilinx ise

Xilinx claims faster compile times with ISE 9.1i. Try it, if you aren't using it already.
**broken link removed**