Chapter 5 – Design Automation of FPGAs

With the increasing complexity and size of digital designs targeted at FPGAs, the days of hand designing the logic code for hardware at the lowest level (i.e., able to be downloaded directly to the device) have long gone. Designers now must rely on design automation tools to manage the code, syntax checking, simulation and synthesis functions. In this chapter we will introduce some of the key concepts and highlight how they can be used most effectively.