The role of the FPGA in modern electronics is quickly moving from a container for fast hardware, to becoming a platform for complete system design. Regardless of how much of the system you are pushing into the FPGAs on your boards, the DXP platform is the most unified FPGA design solution available today.

Altium Designer is the first board-level design system to recognize the growing importance of programmable devices in today’s electronic systems. It comes with libraries of FPGA-based components that can be wired together at the schematic level to create an FPGA design without the need for HDLs. You can interact with the design under test inside the target FPGA using powerful virtual instruments, plus use Altium Designer's full support for linking the FPGA design to the PCB design to pass back pin-swaps performed by the PCB editor’s new automatic pin swap feature.

Altium Designer includes a wide selection of FPGA-based components that are pre-synthesized and pre-verified for a range of target devices. FPGA-based libraries include high-level components such as communications controllers and interface drivers, as well as a vast array of generic logic blocks. Altium Designer also supports HDL-based development for the creation of custom FPGA components or logic blocks for integration with the schematic design.

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To facilitate the design of FPGAs, Altium Designer works with Altium’s unique NanoBoard-NB1 – a LiveDesign-enabled development board that allows you to interactively implement and debug your FPGA design. A combination of virtual instruments and boundary scan technology enables you to interact with your design running on the NanoBoard and 'see' the signals inside the FPGA. When you change your circuit, you just re-download the design to the NanoBoard for further debugging. Altium calls this process LiveDesign, and it allows you to rapidly develop FPGA-based applications without the need for HDL-based simulation.

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To date, one of the biggest challenges with incorporating an FPGA into the electronic product development process was handling the pin assignment and synchronization between the FPGA project and the PCB project. Without this, it is difficult to develop the FPGA and PCB designs in parallel, a must-have requirement in most development schedules today.

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