"Vivado tools are the culmination of work started by Xilinx engineers in 2008 in response to customers' needs for more productivity, faster time to market, and the ability to go beyond programmable logic to programmable systems integration. It has been beta tested with more than 100 customers and Alliance Program members over the past 12 months, including customers using our stacked silicon interconnect-based Virtex-7 devices for extreme capacity and bandwidth," said Xilinx senior vice president of platforms development, Victor Peng.
Vivado Design Environment The Vivado Design Suite provides a highly integrated design environment (IDE) with a completely new generation of system-to-IC level tools, all built on the backbone of a shared scalable data model and a common debug environment. It is also an open environment based on industry standards such as the AMBA4 AXI4 interconnect specification, IP-XACT IP packaging metadata, the Tool Command Language (Tcl), Synopsys Design Constraints (SDC) and others that facilitate design flows tailored to the user's needs. Xilinx architected Vivado tools to enable the combination of all types of programmable technologies and scale up to 100-million-ASIC equivalent gate designs.
To address integration bottlenecks, the Vivado IDE includes electronic system level (ESL) design tools for rapidly synthesizing and verifying C-based algorithmic IP; standards based packaging of both algorithmic and RTL IP for reuse; standards based IP stitching and systems integration of all types of system building blocks; and the verification of blocks and systems with 3X faster simulation, while hardware co-simulation provides 100X more performance.
To address implementation bottlenecks, Vivado tools include a hierarchical device editor and floor planner, a 3-15X faster logic synthesis tool with industry leading support for SystemVerilog, and a 4X faster, more deterministic place and route engine that uses analytics to minimize a 'cost' function of multiple variables such as timing, wire length and routing congestion. In addition, incremental flows allow for engineering change order (ECO) induced changes to be quickly processed by only re-implementing a small part of the design, while preserving performance. Finally, leveraging the new shared scalable data model, the tools provide power, timing and area estimates at every stage of the design flow, enabling up front analysis and then optimization with integrated capabilities such as automated clock gating.
"The combination of the Vivado Design Suite and the Virtex-7 2000T FPGA has created a paradigm shift in the programmable logic industry. Vivado has enabled Broadcom to design with the industry's highest capacity FPGA without any manual floorplanning or partitioning," said Paul Rolfe, manager, hardware development engineering, Broadcom Europe. "We are impressed with the innovation that Xilinx is delivering both in silicon and software."
About XilinxXilinx develops All Programmable technologies and devices, beyond hardware to software, digital to analog, and single to multiple die in 3D ICs. These industry leading devices are coupled with a next-generation design environment and IP to serve a broad range of customer needs, from programmable logic to programmable systems integration. For more information, visit www.xilinx.com.
Since Xilinx began working on the Vivado Design Suite four years ago, it has engaged with hundreds of Xilinx Alliance Program members and customers to bring the tools to a mature state for release. Each has played a role in helping to ensure that Xilinx has built a highly productive set of tools for breaking through integration and implementation bottlenecks as customers design their next generation 'All-Programmable' devices. Here's what some of them have to say about the Vivado Design Suite.
EVE, Hardware/Software Co-Verification"With the Vivado Design Suite and Virtex-7 FPGAs, Xilinx is on track to give standard FPGA-based emulation providers, like EVE, compelling performance and capacity boosts versus custom ASIC-based emulation suppliers."
CoreEL Technologies, Premier Xilinx Alliance Program Member"CoreEL's H.264/AVC 4:2:2 10-bit 1080p60 decoder IP core has been licensed to a number of customers for various applications. Complexity of this IP demanded high levels of performance from FPGA tools. The Vivado tools provided us significant gains in runtimes and yielded more compact floorplans compared to earlier flows. This has helped us in having more implementation runs in a day resulting in significant productivity gains. In addition, support for Synopsys Design Constraints makes it more convenient to us and will facilitate faster integration into our customers' design flows. "
Fidus Systems, Inc., Premier Xilinx Alliance Program Member "As a Premier Design Services member of the Xilinx Alliance Program, Fidus has developed many leading-edge Xilinx-based products for technology companies across North America. The Vivado Design Suite's superior user interface and support for ASIC design industry standards such as System Verilog, SystemC, SDC and Tcl will greatly accelerate our design productivity. Xilinx's Vivado Design Suite sets a new industry benchmark and further enables Fidus to deliver complex, high quality, leading edge Xilinx designs to our clients."
Northwest Logic, Premier Xilinx Alliance Program Member"We liked the out-of-the box results of the Vivado Design Suite. We took our Expresso 3.0 core (PCI Express Gen3 x8) through the tools and saw good Quality of Results right from the start. Plus, we use a lot of scripting, so being Tcl based is a big plus for us. That will enable a lot of powerful options. We also see value in the capability of the Vivado IP Packager to allow us to add our IP to the Vivado Extensible IP catalog. This will make it easy for a large number of customers to have access to our IP."
Tokyo Electron Device Ltd., Premier Xilinx Alliance Program Member"The Vivado IP Catalog enables our customers to easily search our IP, documentation and quickly integrate our IP in their designs. With Vivado's new synthesis and place&route algorithm, we expect our customers to realize significant run time reduction."
Xylon d.o.o., Premier Xilinx Alliance Program Member "Xylon has been a longstanding member of the Xilinx Alliance Program and supplier of IP cores under the brand name logicBRICKS. The logicBRICKS IP cores have been continuously maintained and optimized for use with the latest Xilinx programmable devices and implementation tools for almost 15 years. We are excited about the Vivado Design Suite's capabilities and its ease of use, which will enable our customers to use logicBRICKS IP cores in even more efficient ways on technology like the leading Xilinx Zynq-7000 EPP and 7 series FPGAs."
A2e Technologies, Certified Xilinx Alliance Program Member"Integrating A2e Technologies' H.264 Codecs will be greatly simplified through the Vivado IP Integrator. Implementing H.264 video compression and decompression from 720p to 4K resolutions has been somewhat complicated in the past. Now with the Vivado IP Integrator, designers can perform this integration at the interface level rather than the signal level using a single IP interface standard, AMBA AXI4, with design rule checks that minimize errors. This will make our IP even easier to Plug-and-Play in Xilinx designs."
Aliathon, Ltd., Certified Xilinx Alliance Program Member"As a leading provider of FPGA solutions for the OTN market, fast and efficient designs are crucial to Aliathon's success, especially at 100G and beyond. The Vivado Design Suite has helped us minimize chip resources, as well as place and route times. The resulting improvement in power, performance and design iterations allow Aliathon to deliver even better solutions to our customers."
Hardent Inc., Certified Xilinx Alliance Program Member "Providing electronic design services to companies with complex requirements, Hardent is pleased with the accelerated productivity introduced by the Vivado Design Suite. We typically push both the clock rate and utilization limits of Xilinx devices, and with its new place and route engine and incremental design flows, Vivado tools will help our mutual customers with demanding designs; such as for the new 2-million-logic cell Virtex-7 2000T FPGA."
Missing Link Electronics, Certified Xilinx Alliance Program Member"Missing Link Electronics develops embedded systems where software and hardware can be configured for the target application. Short turn-around time and predictable synthesis results are very important for delivering such heterogeneous multi-core system FPGA designs. To us, Xilinx's Vivado Design Suite manifests Xilinx's strong commitment to supporting our industry to deliver better embedded systems, faster!"
Oki Information Systems Co., Certified Xilinx Alliance Program Member"As a Vivado Design Suite Early Access participant, we used Vivado tools to compile our PCIe DMA Controller (iDMAC) IP, and we've migrated the IP from the ISE Design Suite to the Vivado suite without any problem. Thanks to the intuitive Vivado GUI built on PlanAhead, our engineers are able to learn the Vivado IDE easily and quickly. The adoption of ASIC friendly Tcl scripts further improves the ease of use for our IP design engineers who have prior ASIC design experience. Going forward, we plan to use Vivado tools for large designs and we expect to see significant productivity improvement due to numerous technology breakthroughs, such as high performance synthesis, analytic place and route, and low memory consumption."
OmniTek Ltd., Certified Xilinx Alliance Program Member"We took part in the partner training for the Vivado Design Suite and were most impressed. We regard the adoption of industry standards such as IP-XACT, SDC and AMBA AXI4 as essential for the proliferation of FPGA IP needed for the largest 28nm devices. The Vivado IP Integrator and IP Packager tools further reduce the design time required for IP development and integration."
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