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Welcome to this month’s edition of FPGA eNews.

News

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”Bringing the programmable imperative to space”, VME & Critical Systems
Chris Ciufo (Editor) compares the new radiation-hardened FPGA from Xilinx and new rad-tolerant synthesis tool from Mentor Graphics—two different solutions addressing the issue of radiation event effects.

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Mentor Graphics Fields Precision Rad-Tolerant with Versatile TMR, XCELL Journal
XCELL journal highlights Precision Rad-Tolerant and its new synthesis-based radiation effects mitigation capabilities for Xilinx devices.

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Low Power: The Next Big Challenge for FPGA Designers, SOCcentral
This article presents an overview of low-power principles for FPGA design and implementation for multiple device vendors.

White Papers

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Making the Case For an Integrated FPGA Design Flow
Adopting the right FPGA design methodology can determine the course and competitiveness of a design house’s entire business. Development teams can adopt the FPGA vendor software flow “that came with the FPGA”, or adopt 3rd party solutions, or develop a custom flow that mixes both. Some choices offer short-term cost advantages, others offer longer-term flexibility. This paper discusses the pros and cons of the diverse approaches available today.

Technical Events

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EDA Tech Forum - Safety Critical Applications 2-day Virtual Seminar

September 21-22, 2010
Register Now

This 2-day virtual event will explore what’s being done at the macro/industry level to help avoid safety critical problems. It will look at the industry bodies and associations being formed to address concerns early in the design and validation process. We’ll also investigate the standards that are in place to ensure compliance and traceability to requirements. FPGA-specific Sessions include:

• Implementing a Rad-Tolerant Application Using a Commercial FPGA: Automation through Synthesis
  When developing an FPGA application for a high radiation environment, a design house may not want to be limited to just radiation-hardened or rad-tolerant devices. Whether it be due to cost, capacity, re-programmability, or other features, a commercial FPGA may be the preferred choice. This session will discuss a methodology that provides radiation effects mitigation during the implementation flow for a broad range of devices.
• Safety-critical FPGA Verification with GateRocket
  This session presents the Best Practices for successful FPGA design. It is the result of meetings with hundreds of customers on the challenges facing their FPGA design teams. The presentation covers the complete FPGA design flow from the basics to advanced design techniques.
• Xilinx Avionics Solutions
  Xilinx FPGA provides a flexible base platform for reprogrammable hardware with some key enabling solutions for high reliability applications. This presentation will contain an outline of a DO-254 tool flow demo showing how Mentor Graphics EDA tool suite integrates with Xilinx ISE tool. In addition, we will go over the Xilinx perspective on the avionics market and explore some of Xilinx solutions to enable this market.

Product Information

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Precision RTL Plus
Precision RTL Plus is Mentor Graphics’ flagship FPGA synthesis solution offering breakthrough advantages for commercial, mil-aero, and safety-critical applications. The latest release includes enhancements for low power, assurance mode for mil-aero & safety-critical applications, integration with ReqTracer, extension of our vendor-independent IP platform, and IP encryption.

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Precision Rad-Tolerant
Precision Rad-Tolerant is a new member joining Mentor Graphics’ FPGA Synthesis product family offering radiation effects mitigation for aerospace and high reliability applications and includes all the advanced features of Precision RTL Plus.

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ReqTracer
ReqTracer™ 2009.3a includes many new and enhanced tool interfaces which continue to extend ReqTracer’s requirements tracing capabilities for design assurance, verification closure, and requirements driven development.

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Visual Elite
Visual Elite 4.2.0 offers continued enhancements to the many existing features. In addition to these new and expanded features, we have extended the design checking capability and have added an option to support IP-XACT automated assembly.

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