One of the problems of designing with programmable devices is that it’s difficult to visualize what’s going on inside the device. While you can monitor the pins of the device, you have no physical access to the signals with the operating circuit. You are effectively disconnected from the design.
A unique aspect of Altium Designer is that it allows you to connect live to the programmable elements within your design, and interact with the system under development. With the addition of a LiveDesign-enabled developments board, such as Altium’s target-independent NanoBoard, you can process and download the design to the FPGA and dynamically interact in real-time with active devices such as the processors and Altium Designer’s virtual instruments. Working in this way you can take an interactive and iterative approach to the design of systems within FPGAs, minimizing the traditional reliance on simulation. Altium calls this process LiveDesign.
To manage the LiveDesign process, Altium Designer provides a centralized interface from which you can process and synthesize your project, transparently invoke the FPGA vendor tools for device-specific mapping and routing, and download both the hardware and software program files to the target devices.
Once programmed, you can interact with active devices through the interface. You can monitor and set signals within the FPGA-based system using virtual instrument ‘soft’ control panels, and initiate software debug sessions for all processors running in the system. As you make changes you can reprocess and download the new software or hardware and immediately see the effect of the changes.
At the pin level, you can monitor the I/O status of the target programmable device and dynamically reflect this status to the source FPGA project schematics. Altium Designer can also provide a live display of the pin status of FPGAs from within the PCB editor. By providing the appropriate connections on your PCB design, you can even connect your prototype or production board to the system via the NanoBoard and continue the LiveDesign process on your target hardware.
The interactive nature of the LiveDesign process brings the entire development process to life, and allows you to rapidly develop and debug FPGA-based systems. Altium Designer gives you the power to reach into and control the programmable elements of your design, and connects you ‘live’ to your system during development.