FPGA Development: Longterm Experience with FPGA Types

We develop designs for all standard FPGAs.

SRAM based vs. Flash based

SRAM based FPGAs like the ones by Lattice (XP2, ECP2, ECP2M, ECP3, SC and SCM) and Xilinx (Spartan3, Spartan6, Virtex4, Virtex5 and Virtex6) are characterized by:

• a very high integration level
• DSP blocks
• interface blocks for PCI express and DDR-SDRAM-controllers
• high speed serdes for SATA and PCI express

Concerning their structural size, flash based FPGAs by Actel (ProASIC, ProASIC nano, Igloo) can not be produced with the latest technologies, hence the amount of required logic is lower. Despite that, there are numerous advantages, such as

• very low current consumption,
• direct availability after switching on,
• no configuration memory required,
• integration of nonvolatile memory,
• high radiation hardness (RadHard)

which make their application useful in many fields.

Microprocessor Softcores

For all FPGAs, there are softcores for microcontrollers and microprocessors. Actel offers for its FPGAs the ARM cores Cortex-M1 and Cortex-M3. For Lattice FPGAs, there is Mico32, and Xilinx provides the cores MicroBlaze and PicoBlaze.

"Timing not met" ...?

Even a strict observance of all the rules of synchronal design will not guarantee a successful timing closure. Sometimes, you still get error messages or warnings like "Timing not met". This might be remedied with the help of additional pipelining levels. We dispose of extensive knowledge in this field, and are able to improve the timing for various FPGA types.