Product category:
Design and Development Software
News Release from: Synplicity
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 30 April 2003
Pair focus on providing RapidChip
support
LSI Logic and Synplicity have signed a joint development, marketing and distribution agreement to provide an optimised physical synthesis tool expressly for LSI Logic's RapidChip customers.
LSI Logic and Synplicity have signed a joint development, marketing and distribution agreement to provide an optimised physical synthesis tool expressly for LSI Logic's RapidChip customers Synplicity is working closely with LSI Logic's RapidChip engineering team to create a customised physical synthesis solution that uniquely targets the RapidChip architecture and sets a new standard for custom logic designer productivity
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 8 Jun 2001 at 8.00am (UK)
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Synplicity has highlighted details of a second-generation physical synthesis technology for programmable logic designers, the first such technology in the industry
The result of this joint development will be a new class of physical synthesis tool that enables designers to readily achieve design goals on RapidChip products.
As part of the agreement, LSI Logic will also license the jointly developed physical synthesis product for internal use.
RapidChip enables the design of complex, customised system-on-a-chip products quickly and predictably.
Further reading
Software automatically partitions FPGA designs
Synplicity has automated its Certify verification synthesis software to speed the development of FPGA-based ASIC prototypes.
Physical optimiser gets the best from FPGAs
Synplicity's FPGA logic synthesis and physical synthesis products can provide full support for the new Xilinx Integrated Software Environment (ISE) 4.1i.
Logic placement speeds synthesis an extra 10%
Synplicity has enhanced its FPGA/PLD synthesis and physical synthesis software with new productivity and performance-improving features designed to enable higher quality of results.
To meet the RapidChip time-to-market requirements, design tools must be able to automatically map to RapidChip slices and fully use the RapidChip architecture.
Synplicity is developing a custom physical synthesis and mapping tool that enables RapidChip customers to quickly achieve placement-based timing closure of high-density, high-performance designs at their site.
The tool is built on an automated, easy-to-use physical synthesis technology suited for a logic designer, not a physical design expert.
Starting from prebuilt RapidChip slices and using Synplicity's tool, customers benefit from a streamlined design flow that addresses physical design issues up-front: floorplanning, placement, congestion management, test, packaging, power, clock, and signal integrity.
Because physical design issues are addressed early, LSI Logic would be able to deliver a GDSII tape-out as fast as one week per million logic gates from the customer handoff.
This is unprecedented for this level of complexity.
The RapidChip silicon platform includes a customer configurable logic fabric and highly optimised memories coupled with LSI Logic's silicon-proven CoreWare.
The benefit this provides is to enable customers to integrate their unique logic functionality with industry compliant high-speed serdes, industry standard processors and industry leading memories prebuilt on a RapidChip slice.
RapidChip's unique logic architecture can be configured with up to five metal layers enabling designers to realise performance and routing densities typically achieved with standard cell designs and well beyond what is possible with the architectures characteristic of FPGA and other structured ASIC devices.
"LSI Logic's RapidChip silicon platform utilises some innovative architectures and approaches that allow a much broader range of customers access, for the first time, to state of the art technology and intellectual property at an affordable cost of design and entry.
We are developing a physical synthesis product with Synplicity as an enhancement to our RapidChip product to enable our customers to take full advantage of the capabilities offered by RapidChip", said Ronnie Vasishta, Vice President, Technology Marketing, LSI Logic Corp.
"Teaming with Synplicity to provide RapidChip customers with a customised physical synthesis tool is a natural extension of our history in developing and delivering industry-leading design tools and methodologies and once again providing this to a very broad base of customers".
"We believe custom physical synthesis is a requirement for maximising the performance of the RapidChip architecture and we are pleased LSI Logic has chosen Synplicity to develop this tool for its RapidChip design flow", said Ken McElvain, Chief Technical Officer, Synplicity.
"We believe by applying a unique high-performance, high-capacity physical synthesis solution to the RapidChip flow - one which brings together the benefits of physical synthesis and silicon virtual prototyping into one tool environment - designers will be able to achieve significant area reduction for the RapidChip architecture, thus reducing silicon costs".
In a separate purchase agreement, LSI Logic has expanded its use of Synplicity's suite of FPGA and verification design tools.
Synplicity expects its customised physical synthesis product to be available for RapidChip customers in the third quarter of 2003.
Synplicity and LSI Logic are working together to train their field application engineers and design centres on the new product.
In future phases of the relationship, Synplicity intends to develop enhanced versions of the software in conjunction with LSI Logic to integrate the latest design software and architectural enhancements to the RapidChip solution.
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