Mentor Graphics announces new FPGA synthesis innovation in Precision Synthesis 2010a release

WILSONVILLE, USA: Mentor Graphics Corp. has announced its Precision Synthesis 2010a product that provides a variety of enhancements, including new capabilities for mil-aero and safety-critical applications, integration with other Mentor tools, major Quality-of-Results (QoR) improvements, synthesis for lower power, and encryption based on the IEEE P1735 standard.

The Precision Synthesis 2010a product has introduced several feature and flow innovations targeting mil-aero and safety-critical applications. Because design assurance processes such as DO-254 often require extensive verification of the synthesized netlist, Precision 2010a introduces “assured synthesis mode” to avoid synthesis/simulation mismatches and ensure all performed optimizations are formally verifiable.

For design processes that demand requirements tracking, the Precision product now integrates with Mentor Graphics ReqTracer to trace requirements from original specification through synthesis and place-and-route.

“Precision Synthesis 2010a is our most significant FPGA synthesis release in years,” stated Daniel Platzker, Mentor Graphics FPGA product line director, Design Creation and Synthesis Division. “We worked closely with FPGA vendors and key customers to deliver a high-performance solution and technology innovation to address the requirements for a variety of industry applications.”

The new 2010a release also improves its integration within Mentor Graphics FPGA flow to offer a comprehensive design environment. It tightens its integration between Precision Synthesis and FormalPro equivalence checking, the I/O Designer tool for FPGA-PCB design, the Catapult C high level synthesis tool, HDL Designer tool for design creation and reuse, the ModelSim and Questa tools for simulation, and the new ReqTracer requirements tracking tool.

“System houses continue to demand more complete and integrated solutions for their FPGA development,” says Gary Smith, principal of Gary Smith EDA. “Precision’s integration within Mentor’s FPGA flow is important in creating such a comprehensive design environment.”

Additional features in the Precision 2010a product include:

Quality-of-Results (QoR): Precision 2010a delivers significant QoR improvements, overcoming a major bottleneck in achieving design closure. Performance improvement is 12 percent on average and up to 30 percent for some device families.

Low Power Synthesis: Power efficiency is a high priority as FPGAs move into mobile and hand-held applications. Low power synthesis can reduce overall dynamic power by applying optimizations such as reduction of switching activity in clock routes, power-efficient memory access, and power-aware retiming.

Precise-Encrypt: Design security is another concern among developers and IP providers. Precision 2010a introduces Precise-Encrypt, an FPGA vendor-independent encryption flow based on the IEEE P1735 draft. Precise-Encrypt allows encrypted HDL to be shared with project teams, development partners, and IP vendors without disclosing proprietary content.

When used with the Mentor ModelSim or Questa tool, designers can use the same encrypted HDL for both simulation and synthesis, thereby ensuring consistency between the verification and implementation flows.

Precise-IP: Mentor’s FPGA vendor-independent IP platform has been further enhanced with additional Mentor cores and third-party cores from new partners. Precise-IP partners currently include ARM, AeroFlex, CAST, EnSilica, Eureka Technology, Helion, IPextreme, Innovative Logic, OptNgn, and Sital.

The Precision Synthesis product line is available now with a starting price of approximately $21,000.