Xilinx has released ISE Design Suite 13.4 providing analysis and debug capabilities for the 28nm 7 Series FPGAs and partial reconfiguration support for the Artix-7 family and Virtex-7 XT devices.
It is the first design package supporting the Artix-7 and Virtex-7 XT FPGA families.
The ISE Design Suite 13.4 also opens the way to the FPGA firm's MicroBlaze Micro Controller System (MCS) IP core offering, which provides a turnkey microcontroller design.
The microcontroller system includes the MicroBlaze processor, local memory for program and data storage, as well as tightly coupled GPIO, timers, interrupt controllers and other standard peripherals.
Partial reconfiguration support for Artix-7 and Virtex-7 XT FPGAs is now available in the PlanAhead tool.
Partial reconfiguration dynamically modifies logic blocks while the remaining logic operates without interruption. This means designers can use Artix-7 and Virtex-7 XT devices to build systems that are able to swap functions and perform remote updates while operational.
Partial reconfiguration is also intended to reduce costs and design size by taking advantage of time-multiplexing that ultimately leads to reduced board space and minimises bitstream storage because smaller, or fewer, devices can be used.
The ChipScope Pro tool, available in the ISE 13.4 release, provides an RX Margin Analysis tool to help engineers optimize signal quality and lower the bit error ratio (BER) on their designs. The RX Margin Analysis tool uses 2-dimensional statistical Eye Scan algorithms to interactively characterize and optimize channel quality in real time, or during post-run processing.
"With hardware designs increasingly using more point-to-point buses, at faster speeds and sending larger data packets, it is becoming more important for design engineers to pay close attention to the quality, error rates and margins that such designs require," said Tom Feist, Senior Director of Software and Tools Marketing at Xilinx.
The MicroBlaze processor and all Xilinx embedded IP cores are now supported with the Synopsys VCS simulator in addition to Cadence, Mentor and Xilinx simulation solutions. The MicroBlaze MCS is included in all ISE Design Suite Editions, ISE WebPACK and is compatible with AutoESL™ high-level synthesis tool v2011.4.
ISE Design Suite 13 is available now for all ISE Editions and list priced starting at $2,995 for the Logic Edition and now supports 32 and 64 bit Windows 7 operating systems. Customers can download full-featured 30-day evaluation versions at no charge from the Xilinx web site.
www.xilinx.com
