CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
19 March 2007
Product News
Mentor Graphics Announces Synthesis Support for New Altera Cyclone III FPGAs
Mentor Graphics Corporation, announced that its suite of advanced synthesis products supports the newly introduced Cyclone® III field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) from Altera Corporation . Both companies have been in close cooperation to ensure Precision® Synthesis support for the full range of Cyclone III devices. Beta support for the new family is currently available in Precision Synthesis with production support scheduled for release in April.
The Cyclone III family is Altera's third-generation of low-cost FPGAs offering lower power with greater logic, memory, and multiplier densities than previous generations. "With the Cyclone III family's combination of power and functionality, designers of cost-sensitive high-volume applications will require a robust synthesis tool to maximize every drop of performance and logic density," said Simon Bloch, general manager, Mentor Graphics Design Creation and Synthesis Division. "Customers wanting to take full advantage of the value of Cyclone III FPGAs will need Precision Synthesis."
The companies began collaboration in the middle of last year on support for the Cyclone III FPGA family within the Mentor Graphics family of synthesis tools. Cyclone III beta customers were also given access to early versions of Cyclone-III-specific Precision Synthesis libraries for testing and check out. "We expect our Cyclone III customers to be focused on driving new products to existing markets as well as developing new applications, and part of the challenge is design cycle time," said Danny Biran, vice president of product and corporate marketing at Altera. "Our customers will benefit from Precision Synthesis' rapid design-cycle and advanced design-analysis capabilities in getting their products to market quickly."
Precision Synthesis forms the centerpiece of the Mentor Graphics FPGA flow with support for design creation, verification and printed circuit board (PCB) integration - the industry's most comprehensive vendor-independent solution for FPGA design. With advanced support for ASIC prototyping (support for DesignWare® libraries, Synopsys design constraints (SDC), gated-clock handling, etc.) plus advanced implementation and optimization techniques such as automatic mapping and inferencing of dedicated digital signal procession (DSP) and random-access memory (RAM) blocks, Precision Synthesis is uniquely suited to handle today's high-end FPGAs. In addition, Precision Synthesis features an award-winning design analysis capability, allowing designers to cross-probe between multiple views as well as perform interactive static timing for rapid "what-if" analyses. Precision Synthesis reduces design iterations, and enables faster, more predictable completion of designs, while delivering high quality of results (QoR).
As a part of the Mentor Graphics synthesis product line, LeonardoSpectrumT offers customers a well-proven, mature synthesis solution for both FPGAs and application specific integrated circuits (ASICs). Support for Cyclone III FPGAs within the LeonardoSpectrum tool suite will follow the production support within Precision Synthesis.
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