Underlying the increased use of FPGA devices for large SoC designs, Xilinx is seeing a significant attention being paid to it by large EDA companies, like Synopsys and Mentor.

On the heels of the activities announced during DVCon Synopsys has announced support for the newer version of Xilinx's ISE with its Synplify Pro, Synplify Premier and Synphony synthesis products.

Mentor has announced that its advanced synthesis products support Xilinx 28nm 7 series field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). Xilinx 7 series FPGAs are built on a low-power and unified FPGA architecture that scales across low-cost and ultra high-end families. Support for the new 28nm Virtex-7 and Kintex-7 FPGA families is available now and support for Artix-7 will follow. Mentor Graphics is the first EDA FPGA synthesis provider to offer physical synthesis support for Virtex-7 and Kintex-7 FPGA designs.

Details of Mentor's Announcement

The Precision Synthesis tool forms the centerpiece of the Mentor Graphics vendor-independent solution for FPGA design. It offers true push-button, multi-vendor physical synthesis for achieving the best quality of results. With comprehensive language support, including SystemVerilog, advanced ASIC prototyping flow and automatic incremental synthesis, the Precision Synthesis tool is well suited to handle today's high-end FPGAs.

The push-button capabilities of the Precision® tool works in conjunction with the new Xilinx ISE Design Suite 13 to provide superior Quality-of-Results (QoR). Designers can also leverage the Precision tool's support for industry-leading SystemVerilog and mixed language support to implement their designs. During the implementation cycle, customers with large designs can reduce run time by utilizing the Precision tool's unique automatic incremental synthesis and its integration with Xilinx SmartCompile.

Engineers from Xilinx and Mentor Graphics worked together to provide a smooth transition for customers migrating to the 7 series FPGAs. "Both teams worked jointly for the last several months to build on the success of our previous generation devices," said Tom Feist, senior marketing director for ISE Design Suite at Xilinx. "With Precision's physical synthesis support, mutual customers benefit from excellent quality of results for our next generation FPGAs."

Details of the Synopsys Announcement
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.