Synplicity Announces Immediate Support For Xilinx Virtex-5 FXT FPGAs

“Our ongoing relationship with Synplicity results in solutions that maximize the capabilities of ultra high-density designs implemented in Xilinx 65-nm Virtex-5 FPGAs,” said Steve Lass, senior director software marketing at Xilinx. “For customers designing with Virtex-5 FXT FPGAs, we advocate the use of the Synplify Pro tool as it provides outstanding timing and area results for these high-performance devices.”

The Virtex-5 FXT platform comes with up to two PowerPC 440 processor blocks, high-performance DSP and high-speed serial capabilities to deliver a comprehensive system-integration platform for high-performance applications such as audio/video broadcast, communications, military, aerospace and many others. One of the key reasons software customers targeting Virtex-5 FXT FPGAs get optimal timing and area results using the Synplify Pro tool is because the synthesis algorithms in the product have been developed to take advantage of the 6-input Look Up Tables (LUTs) that characterize the Virtex-5 family. Existing synthesis technology, based upon 4-input LUT architectures, will not be able to deliver optimal results when targeting Virtex-5 FXT FPGAs.

“By combining two IBM PowerPC 440 embedded processors with over 190 GMACs of DSP processing horsepower in a single device, Xilinx has created a truly impressive system-integration platform with the Virtex-5 FXT FPGAs,” said Jeff Garrison, senior director of marketing, FPGA Implementation at Synplicity. “The Synplify Pro software, already tightly integrated into the Xilinx ISE and XtremeDSP Development Tools environments, now supports the entire system design flow by supporting the Xilinx embedded development tool, Platform Studio, using a new script-based flow. This flow makes it easy for system designers, with limited FPGA design experience, to achieve optimum results using Synplify Pro.”