Synopsys Announces FPGA Synthesis Support for Xilinx's Newest ISE Design Suite 13

FPGA device technology is advancing rapidly toward ASIC-like complexity, said Tom Feist, senior director, IDS marketing at Xilinx. The Synopsys synthesis software along with our new IDS 13 enables our customers to successfully take advantage of the capabilities this complexity brings with it, and our collaboration with Synopsys lets our customers produce the best results.

Synphony high-level synthesis creates optimized FPGA implementations for use with Synplify Pro and Synplify Premier software and includes integration features such as technology characterization, constraint generation for multi-rate, multi-clock implementations, and support for advanced device hardware such as multipliers, DSP units and memories. Together, the Synplify Pro/Synplify Premier design software and the Synphony High-Level Synthesis tools provide a comprehensive synthesis solution that helps eliminate months of time spent hand-coding RTL while reducing risk in large, multi-million gate designs.

The Synplify Pro and Synplify Premier design tools offer faster runtimes which are especially important for high-density designs. The Synplify Premier software's Fast-Mode enables up to 4X faster runtimes than normal logic synthesis, and when combined with multiprocessing, can achieve up to 10X faster runtimes. When used for FPGA-based prototyping projects, Synplify Premier software automatically converts the gated clocks, generated clocks and tri-states present in many ASIC designs into the target FPGA, making RTL code changes unnecessary. Synplify Premier software also includes extensive SystemVerilog language support and native support for DesignWare® IP, which allows the same IP code used in the design to be available within the FPGA-based prototype.

Because of their close collaboration, Synopsys and Xilinx offer several optimized and integrated tool features. For example, Synplify Pro and Synplify Premier software and Xilinx's ISE Design Suite deliver a jointly developed Design Preservation flow, allowing users to iterate on targeted portions of the design while maintaining the performance of pre-implemented, pre-verified design blocks. The Synplify Pro software's integration with the Xilinx Embedded Design Kit (EDK) makes it easy for MicroBlaze processor users to include EDK generated components in their Synplify project.

We have been working closely with Xilinx to provide best-in-class FPGA synthesis support for Xilinx's newest FPGA devices, said John Koeter, vice president of marketing for the Solutions Group at Synopsys. The scalability, capacity and performance ranges of the 7 series FPGAs open up new applications for FPGAs. Using Synopsys' Synplify and Synphony software helps our mutual customers to take full advantage of these larger devices while improving quality of results, achieving faster time-to-market and lowering their design risk.

Designers using the Synopsys FPGA design tools get fast time-to-results for complex FPGAs, area optimization for lower part cost, power reduction and incremental and team-design capabilities for faster FPGA deployment. Synopsys FPGA design tools include Synplify Pro logic synthesis, Synplify Premier advanced FPGA implementation and Identify® integrated RTL debugger. Synopsys FPGA design tools provide additional value by offering DesignWare® IP support, links to high-performance VCS® functional verification solutions, integration with Synphony C Compiler and Synphony Model Compiler, and an ASIC-compatible synthesis flow for FPGA-based prototyping.