Independent Design Tools

This chapter discusses several design tools for field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA). Dillon Engineering offers a variety of custom design services, with particular emphasis on FPGA-based DSP algorithms and high-bandwidth, real-time digital signal, and image processing applications. They have developed a tool called ParaCore Architect™ that facilitates the design of IP cores. The process begins by creating a source file containing a highly parameterized description of the design at an extremely high level of abstraction using a Python-based language. ParaCore Architect™ takes this description, combines it with parameter values specified by the user, and generates an equivalent HDL representation, a cycle-accurate C/C++ model to speed up verification in the form of simulation, and an associated test bench. One of the ParaCore Architect™ design descriptions can be used to generate corresponding floating-point cores. Different parameters are used to define whatever exponent and mantissa precisions are required, how many pipeline stages to use, whether or not to handle IEEE floating-point special cases like infinity, the type of microprocessor core being used, and so forth.