Boost productivity with Xilinx Vivado Design Suite 2012.3

The folks at Xilinx have announced the immediate availability of Vivado Design Suite 2012.3, offering for the first time new productivity enhancements for customers running the tools on multi-core processor workstations as well as new reference designs for speeding design implementation.

“We continue to focus on all aspects of our customers’ productivity with each new release of Xilinx’s next generation design environment,” said Tom Feist, Xilinx’s senior marketing director of design methodology. “With Xilinx’s massive All Programmable 3D ICs with up to 2,000,000 logic cells in mind, reducing runtime for our customers is just one of the many ways the Vivado Design Suite is a generation ahead in helping designers get their products to market faster.”

Since its debut in April, the Vivado Design Suite has been accelerating time to implementation from C and RTL by up to 4x for complex designs, while improving performance with up to 1 speed grade advantage over the ISE Design Suite and up to 3 speed grades over competing devices. Thanks to new multithreaded place and route technology, the latest release in the landmark rollout of Xilinx’s next generation design environment accelerates productivity even further on multi-core workstations with 1.3x faster runtimes on a dual-core processor and 1.6x faster runtimes on a quad-core.

All Programmable 7 Series FPGA targeted reference designs
The release of Vivado Design Suite 2012.3 extends Xilinx’s portfolio of Targeted Reference Designs (TRD)s supporting Kintex-7 and Virtex-7 All Programmable FPGAs to accelerate designer productivity even further. TRDs deliver a pre-verified, performance-optimized infrastructure design that a designer can modify and scale to suit their custom needs.

• The Kintex-7 FPGA Base TRD showcases the capabilities of Kintex-7 FPGAs through a fully-integrated PCIe design that delivers 10 Gb/s performance end-to-end using performance-optimized DMA engine and DDR3 memory controller.
• The Kintex-7 FPGA Connectivity TRD delivers up to 20 Gb/s of performance per direction featuring a dual Network Interface Card (NIC) with a Gen2 x8 PCIe endpoint, a multi-channel packet DMA, DDR3 memory for buffering, 10G Ethernet MAC, and 10GBASE-R standard compatible physical layer interface.
• The Kintex-7 FPGA Embedded TRD offers a comprehensive processor subsystem complete with GbE, DDR3 memory controller, display controller, and other standard processor peripherals.
• The Kintex-7 FPGA DSP TRD includes a high-speed analog interface with digital up / down conversion overclocked to run at 491.52 MHz.

Availability
Vivado Design Suite, Design Edition is available at no additional cost to in warranty ISE Design Suite Logic Edition and Embedded Edition customers, and Vivado Design Suite System Edition with Vivado High-Level Synthesis is available at no additional cost to ISE Design Suite DSP and System Edition customers.

Click Here to download the latest version of the ISE Design Suite and Vivado Design Suite. Customers can now also sign up for or view online training for Vivado Design Suite.

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