Two new tools aid FPGA design

Actel and Lattice and have some new FPGA design tools that are definitely worth looking into.

Actel’s SmartPower addition to the Libero IDE supports the IGLOO, ProASIC3, and the SmartFusion, and Fusion FPGA families. It quickly identifies static and dynamic power consumption design problems and offers a hierarchical view, allowing you to drill down and estimate the power consumption of individual components or events, rather than restricting you to the overall design. The tool analyzes power consumption for nets, gates, I/Os, memories, clocks, cores, clock domains, power supply rails, peak power during a clock cycle, and switching transitions.

SmartPower generates detailed hierarchical reports of the dynamic power consumption of a design for easy inspection. These reports include design-level power summary, average switching activity, and ambient and junction temperature readings. You input the target clock and data frequencies for your design, and let SmartPower perform a detailed power analysis. It supports importing files in the value-change dump (VCD) format, as specified in the IEEE 1364 standard. It also supports the Synopsys Switching Activity Interchange Format (SAIF) standard and lets you generate switching activity information in a variety of simulators and then import this information directly.

Lattice Semiconductor has completely revamped its design tool suite with a new tool called Diamond. It is a complete environment with design entry, synthesis, implementation, analysis, on-chip debug hardware analysis, simulation, and programming. Design exploration is made easy with the mixing of Verilog, VHDL, EDIF, and schematic sources, the creation of multiple versions of a design within a single project, and “recipes” that can be applied to any implementation within a project or shared between projects. The tool also has functions to manage and choose files for constraints, timing analysis, power calculation, and hardware debug along with a “run manager” view to allow parallel processing of multiple implementations to explore design alternatives for optimum results.

The Diamond user interface combines leading edge features and customization with better ease of use. All the tools now open in “Views” integrated into a common Diamond user interface and have the ability to be detached in separate windows. Once the operation for a single tool view is learned, this knowledge can be applied to other views. New features like the Start Page and Reports view allow easy access to information. HDL explorer gives a graphical view of your HDL hierarchy and allows sophisticated rule checking.

A free license for Diamond can be requested from the Lattice Web site, or a subscription license can be purchased for just $895.