Two major EDA vendors—Magma Design Automation and Mentor Graphics—have both announced synthesis support for Xilinx’s new Virtex-5 family of FPGAs. The vendors are now making early-access software available.
Magma’s Blast FPGA synthesis tool delivers optimized and intelligent implementation options, enabling users to realize the performance gains available in the new Virtex-5 FPGAs without manual user intervention or multiple design iterations. It enables designers to improve the area usage and performance of these 65-nm devices.
Blast FPGA interfaces with FPGA implementation tools such as the Xilinx ISE design suite and supports vendor-specific design constraints, netlists, and IP or library blocks. The tool builds its workflow on top of the FPGA physical design framework.
Mentor Graphics has collaborated with Xilinx over the past year to ensure support for the full range of Virtex-5 LX devices with the upcoming releases of the Xilinx ISE design suite and Mentor Precision Synthesis software. Built on a unified data model, the Precision Synthesis tool suite allows designers to cross-probe between multiple views, giving users added control when analyzing designs. This design analysis capability is coupled to an intuitive debug environment. To further enhance engineering productivity, Precision Synthesis includes an incremental timing analysis tool.