Moving circuit functionality from the board into programmable devices such as FPGAs can bring enormous freedom to the hardware design process. The logic inside the FPGA can be changed and reconfigured throughout the design process, freeing you from the constraints imposed by hard-wiring components at the board level.
Conventional FPGA tools typically rely on extensive HDL design experience and a working knowledge of the architecture of the target programmable device. Also, sourcing and instantiating large functional IP blocks can be a challenge, entailing design flows that are vastly different in concept from working with off-the-shelf components hard-wired on a PCB.
Altium Designer has been created to allow you to easily work with programmable devices using the same skills and convenience currently enjoyed at the board level. Within Altium Designer you can take ready-to-use FPGA-based components and wire them together at the block level within Altium Designer’s schematic editor to create the circuit design. This allows rapid capture of system functionality for implementation in an FPGA.
Extensive FPGA component libraries
To facilitate this graphical approach to FPGA design, Altium Designer includes extensive libraries of ready-to-use FPGA components. Components range from generic logic functions such as counters, multiplexers and various logic gates, right through to complete 32-bit processors and high-level peripheral devices – all you need to create the entire system functionality of your design.
FPGA components are supplied as schematic symbols linked to sets of pre-synthesized, pre-verified models suitable for implementation on any FPGA device supported by the system. The components are supplied on a royalty-free basis, eliminating the difficulty of sourcing FPGA-based IP from external suppliers and allowing you to concentrate on the task at hand – using the components to create your designs.
Within Altium Designer, the ability to simply drag components from a library and wire them together to create the FPGA design means that you can work at the high level of abstraction with programmable devices. You can harness the potential of programmable devices without losing the convenience of working with off-the-shelf, ready-to-use components.
Target any FPGA
Altium Designer is a completely FPGA vendor-neutral design environment. Use the supplied components to construct your system functionality and you can target the design to a wide variety of FPGAs from multiple FPGA vendors. This gives you complete freedom in the specification of your target devices.
What’s more, with Altium Designer there is no need to settle on any particular target device before you start a design. The system allows you to easily retarget your design during development to any suitable FPGA supported by the system.
Perhaps the most important advantage is that with Altium Designer you are not locked in to any particular FPGA vendor or device family. As new devices are released, or as device availability and cost fluctuate, you have the freedom to migrate your design across devices to capitalize on opportunities and avoid potential risks.
Mix HDL and schematic capture
The wide range of FPGA components supplied with Altium Designer will allow you to create most, if not all, of the system functionality you require. But there will always be occasions when you need to create custom IP blocks yourself, or define particular logic functionality using a hardware description language.
Altium Designer supports the use of both VHDL and Verilog to capture design logic and allows you to easily incorporate HDL source files within your overall system schematics. Altium Designer’s fully-featured code editor supports syntax highlighting for both VHDL and Verilog code, providing a complete HDL development environment.
With Altium Designer you can use HDL to capture as much or as little of the design as you need. You have complete freedom to mix VHDL and Verilog sources with schematic-based FPGA components to create your overall system definition. This allows you to choose the most appropriate capture method for each step of the design process.
Test using FPGA-based virtual instruments
To test the overall functionality of your design, Altium Designer provides you with a set of FPGA-based virtual instruments that can be used in an analogous way to bench test instruments at the board level. This allows you to probe and stimulate interconnections within the system running on the programmable device. The virtual instruments are incorporated in your design at the schematic level and connected to the appropriate nets within the design.
When the design is processed and downloaded to the programmable device, the Altium Designer system communicates with the instruments via a secondary JTAG chain established within the FPGA. Soft front panels then allow you to stimulate and interrogate your circuit interactively, allowing you to debug problems and verify circuit performance. You can then make changes to your design, reprocess it and repeat the testing.
With its extensive range of virtual instruments and interactive test environment, Altium Designer brings the convenience and speed of board-level debug to the FPGA design process and allows you to work interactively with FPGA components during system development.