Archive for July, 2013
Tuesday, July 30th, 2013
 Retargeting Legacy Designs for New Technology
Digital design has come a long way since its inception from drawing schematic on paper, to CAD tools which can be used to draw schematics, and to today’s most popular (and efficient) process of describing designs through HDLs.
I recently encountered a customer with a legacy design developed in block diagram format. If he hadn’t been an Aldec customer, he might have been stuck. Fortunately, Aldec Active-HDL™ provides utilities for importing legacy schematic based designs from Xilinx® Foundation Series, ViewLogic™, ViewDraw™, Active-CAD™ or any schematic tools that can output an EDIF netlist.
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Tags: active-cad, active-cad format, Active-HDL, Aldec, design, eda tools, edif netlist, importing legacy schematic based designs, schematic tools, verilog, VHDL, viewdraw, viewlogic, Xilinx, xilinx foundation series, xilinx virtex
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Wednesday, July 24th, 2013
 Breaking the Bottleneck of RTL Simulation
Utilizing hardware acceleration in a System-on-Chip verification cycle can speed-up HDL simulation runs from 10-100x, while providing the robust debugging available from an RTL simulator. Acceleration (also referred to as Co-Simulation) combines the speed of FPGA-based prototyping boards, by offloading resource hungry modules into the FPGA, while non-synthesizable constructs of the testbench remain in the RTL simulator.
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Tags: acceleration, Aldec, asic gates, FPGA, fpga boards, fpga-based prototyping boards, hardware acceleration, Hardware Emulation, HDL, hdl simulation, hes design verification manager, HES-DVM, Riviera-PRO, rtl simulator, soc design, system-on-chip verification cycle
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Monday, July 22nd, 2013
 To Accelerate DSP Design Development
If we’re being honest, human beings, especially engineers, are lazy. Let’s face it, most inventions ever made were created for the sole purpose of making our lives easier. The same goes for the manner in which we create our designs. In the not so distant past, engineers were drawing designs by hand on huge trace paper, placing them one below the other to form layers. This sounds like hard work to me! The lazy me would have wanted a smart (read: easy) solution to this process. Then along comes the EDA industry, which Aldec has been part of since 1984, making it much easier for us to do our designs.
Some might argue that EDA was born out not out of laziness, but in fact neccessity, due to increasing design complexity. True, it is impossible to imagine how the pencil and paper method could even work today. The point is it didn’t, and we now have automated the process to such an extent all you need do is enter some parameters in a tool wizard.
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Tags: accelerate dsp design development, Aldec, co-simulation, data analysis, data visualization, debugging, design, dsp algorithm, eda industry, edif cells, hdl code, hdl simulator, matlab, Riviera-PRO, simulink, verification, verilog modules, vhdl entities
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Monday, July 8th, 2013
HW/SW Emulation and Functional Verification of Xilinx FPGAs
 As an Aldec Hardware Product Manager, I make the quick flight from our home base in Las Vegas to San Jose pretty regularly. This week, I’ll be joining Aldec Software Product Manager, Dmitry Melnik, as we head out to attend “Smarter 2013”, Xilinx’ annual Technical Sales Conference.
Since Aldec is a Xilinx Alliance Member, we have been invited to showcase our solutions at their conference’s Partner Night. Working closely with key technology partnerships like Xilinx has long been the cornerstone to Aldec’s success. Our mutual customers have benefited from these alliances, the result of hard work, open communication and close interaction between our teams.
Most recently, we’ve been syncing with our counterparts at Xilinx to fulfill the verification requirements of the newest SoC designs, as Aldec provides EDA solutions at every stage of development. Users can leverage the latest Xilinx ISE and Vivado design suites to simulate and verify designs in Aldec Active-HDL and Riviera-PRO, or incorporate Aldec FPGA-based prototyping boards utilizing Virtex-7 FPGAs for hardware emulation and SoC prototyping.
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Tags: FPGA, FPGA Simulation, Functional Verification, Hardware Emulation, Hardware-Assisted Verification, HES, Riviera-PRO, SoC, SoC and ASIC Prototyping, Virtex-7, Xilinx, Zynq
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Retargeting Legacy Designs for New Technology
