Alliance speeds FPGA-on-board designs

Collaboration between Mentor Graphics and Xilinx has resulted in reduced design time and optimized performance for integrated FPGA-on-board designs.

Mentor Graphics has collaborated with Xilinx to supply Expedition and PADS users with reference data which allows them to more efficiently implement the multigigabit transceiver (MGT) technology available in Xilinx advanced field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) on their printed circuit board (PCB) designs.

In an effort to ensure optimal multigigabit interconnect implementation, Mentor Graphics has teamed up with Xilinx to provide the Virtex-II Pro RocketIO MGT characterisation board reference design for the PADS and Expedition product families.

"The Xilinx reference designs enable our Expedition and PADS customers to accelerate their design process, improve design quality and achieve optimal system performance".

"Today, system designers are faced with significant chip to board implementation challenges, such as increased FPGA densities and speeds in the multi-gigabit-per-second ranges?, said Henry Potts, Vice President and General Manager, Systems Design Division, Mentor Graphics.

"These reference designs enable easy integration of complex FPGAs onto the PCB?.

Preconfigured design data can immediately be implemented in customer design flows, saving hours of library setup time, significantly reducing design time and improving system quality versus having to develop all this data from scratch.

Supported by Mentor Graphics, the design kit includes a reference PCB layout and a part library that include symbols and footprints.

Complimentary RocketIO signal integrity models are also available for Mentor Graphics HyperLynx and ICXR products.

The Xilinx Virtex-II Pro RocketIO MGT characterisation board databases are available on the Mentor website.

The Virtex-II Pro RocketIO MGT Characterisation Board (Xilinx HW-V2P-ML321) enables customers to investigate and experiment with the features of the Virtex-II Pro Rocket I/O multigigabit transceivers.

Xilinx used Mentor's PADS and HyperLynx solutions to develop the characterisation board.

Xilinx chose these solutions because of their ease-of-use, technical breadth and technical support from Mentor.

"Our success in using Mentor Graphics' tools to develop this reference design enables our customers to implement Xilinx FPGAs sooner in the design process, so they can evaluate their designs and make changes, if needed?, said Steve Lass, Director of Software Marketing at Xilinx.

"Support by popular PCB design tools like PADS and Expedition is important to the customer acceptance of our high speed I/O technology in our Virtex-II Pro and new Virtex-4 FPGA families?.

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