This morning I attended Mentor Graphics’s webinar about FPGA Synthesis, by Roger Do and Robert Jeffery.
Synthesis is a stage in the design flow that I personally give a lot of attention to the reports and the constraints. I am always excited about Synthesis. It is a moment that the designer and the synthesis tool share a bond. The webinar was fine and the key items covered were
- Register retiming
- Resource sharing
- Physical-aware synthesis
- Incremental synthesis
- Interconnect delays
From my perspective, the webinar was not too FPGA oriented as the webinar’s title suggested but covered common elements that one will also encounter in ASIC design. I was hoping to learn more about extra features that a third-party EDA vendor might provide that the FPGA providers don’t.
At the end, I asked a question about how the TCL scripting commands/arguments. From my point of view, the more there are tools from different vendors in a design flow the more complex is to automate the flow by scripting. Hence I wanted to know more about how the learning curve is when scripting with a third-party synthesis tool for FPGA design. My question was taken as what are the benefits of scripting, but not how difficult would it be for learning different commands/arguments from different vendors which do more or less the same task.
However, I really enjoy the webinar and thank MentorGraphics for their bi-weekly webinars. I am looking forward for the next webinar about CDC (Clock Domain Crossing).
I also participated in their poll. One of the questions on the poll was about which vendor’s FPGA I am using. I am always impressed to see in such poll that 2/3 of the participants choose Xilinx’s FPGA over Altera’s FPGA. I have not yet understood the reason behind it. One of the reasons I would choose Altera’s FPGA is because their constraints are in the SDC format, whereas Xilinx uses its own. It reassures me about the certainty of the constraints I want to apply. Hence,this ensures a quicker prototyping for a junior ASIC guy like me who visits the FPGA world.