First public access release to Xilinx Vivado design suite

The folks from Xilinx have just made available the first public release of their next generation design environment.  The Vivado Design Suite 2012.2 is now available to all ISE Design Suite customers who are currently in warranty at no additional cost.

This release is the first in a two-phase rollout, with the first phase focused on accelerating time to implementation from C and RTL, and the second focused on accelerating time to integration of system level functions.

Vivado Design Suite 2012.2 delivers a highly Integrated Design Environment (IDE) with a completely new generation of system-to-IC tools that include High-Level Synthesis, RTL Synthesis, analytical place and route, and an advanced SDC-based timing engine, all of which means that developers can increase their productivity with a 4x acceleration in design implementation.

Vivado Design suite accelerates implementation from RTL
Given the size and complexity of today’s designs, developers face multidimensional design challenges that prevent them from achieving automated design closure. The Vivado Design Suite 2012.2 place and route technology accelerates implementation cycles by using analytical techniques to optimize for multiple and concurrent design metrics, such as congestion, total wire length and timing. For complex designs, this results in performance improvements of 15 percent cooressponding to a 1 speed grade advantage over the ISE Design Suite. The same performance improvement also extends Xilinx’s high-performance leadership over competing devices by 3 speed grades among the mid-range families, while delivering better performance vs. power trade-offs on the high-end, and better performance on the low-cost end of the respective product portfolios.  


 “As part of the Vivado Design Suite Early Access Program, we are pleased to see Xilinx bringing ASIC class tools to the FPGA industry,” said Luc Burgun, CEO, President and Founder of EVE. “With its advanced place and route algorithms and sophisticated design analysis environment, the Vivado Design Suite has significantly improved our productivity and has given us a time-to-market advantage.”

Vivado Design Suite accelerates implementation from C     
With the general release of the Vivado Design Suite, Xilinx continues its thrust in Electronic System-Level (ESL) design by releasing Vivado High-Level Synthesis (HLS) for All Programmable 7 series FPGA and Zynq-7000 EPP SoC devices. HLS will be included at no additional cost to ISE Design Suite DSP Edition and System Edition customers currently in warranty.  Designers can quickly explore implementation architectures for complex algorithms by synthesizing their C, C++ or System C code to RTL. Vivado HLS also integrates with the System Generator tool by creating fast simulation models for enabling the rapid development of applications such as video, imaging, RADAR and baseband radios. Not only does Vivado HLS accelerate algorithm implementation, it also reduces verification time by up to 10,000x while improving system performance by enabling RTL micro-architecture exploration.

“In FPGA design, we always use C to quickly build a system-level model for validation of key algorithms and architectures, but we’ve always encountered the problem of how we could quickly and efficiently convert C into a hardware description language,” said Hengqi Liu, Central R&D Data Center CTO, at ZTE China. “With Xilinx Vivado High-Level Synthesis, this problem has been effectively addressed, as we recently used C to implement a key algorithm, and then used the tool to successfully map the C code into Verilog. We verified both the functionality and performance in Xilinx devices and the results showed that Vivado High-Level Synthesis is very useful in an FPGA design flow.”

Integration and the Xilinx Alliance Program
To further accelerate designer productivity, Xilinx continues its on-going collaboration  with its growing base of key Xilinx Alliance Program members by ensuring IP cores are validated and design tools are available to augment the ISE Design Suite and Vivado Design Suite tools. This collaboration is also key for the second phase of the Vivado Design Suite rollout that includes the Vivado IP Integrator, an interactive design and verification environment, and the Vivado IP Packager, which enables Xilinx, 3rd party IP providers and end customers to package a core, module or completed design with all constraints, test benches and documentation.

Availability
In-warranty ISE Design Suite Logic Edition and Embedded Edition customers will receive the new Vivado Design Suite Edition, and those with ISE Design Suite DSP and System Edition will receive the new Vivado Design Suite System Edition at no additional cost.

The new features and methodologies for accelerating time to integration will be available early next year as part of the second phase of the Vivado Design Suite rollout. Please visit Xilinx.com to download the latest version of the ISE Design Suite and Vivado Design Suite. Customers can also sign up for Vivado Design Suite Training Classes.

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