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This book focuses on FPGA EDA tools, the very foundation of FPGA technology. Instead of illustrating how to use them, this book dives into the tools themselves, revealing how these tools are being designed and how they may improve. Unlike other semiconductors, FPGA has a distinctive two-stage EDA system: chip design EDA and application design EDA.State-of-the-art algorithms, data models and design methodologies/standards are the main concerns of this book, and these will be very helpful for FPGA EDA engineers and researchers to obtain a bird's eye view of this complicated knowledge system. In the chip design EDA part, full-custom and semicustom methodologies bring up ASIC-like EDA tools, and in the application design EDA side, typical topics including high-level synthesis, logic synthesis, physical implementation, bitstream configuration, etc., are well discussed.

This book describes the optimized implementations of several arithmetic datapath, controlpath and pseudorandom sequence generator circuits for realization of high performance arithmetic circuits targeted towards a specific family of the high-end Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). It explores regular, modular, cascadable and bit-sliced architectures of these circuits, by directly instantiating the target FPGA-specific primitives in the HDL. Every proposed architecture is justified with detailed mathematical analyses. Simultaneously, constrained placement of the circuit building blocks is performed, by placing the logically related hardware primitives in close proximity to one another by supplying relevant placement constraints in the Xilinx proprietary “User Constraints File”. The book covers the implementation of a GUI-based CAD tool named FlexiCore integrated with the Xilinx Integrated Software Environment (ISE) for design automation of platform-specific high-performance arithmetic circuits from user-level specifications. This tool has been used to implement the proposed circuits, as well as hardware implementations of integer arithmetic algorithms where several of the proposed circuits are used as building blocks. Implementation results demonstrate higher performance and superior operand-width scalability for the proposed circuits, with respect to implementations derived through other existing approaches. This book will prove useful to researchers, students and professionals engaged in the domain of FPGA circuit optimization and implementation.

What if you could use software to design hardware? Not just any hardware--imagine specifying the behavior of a complex parallel computer, sending it to a chip, and having it run on that chip--all without any manufacturing? With Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), you can design such a machine with your mouse and keyboard. When you deploy it to the FPGA, it immediately takes on the behavior that you defined. Want to create something that behaves like a display driver integrated circuit? How about a CPU with an instruction set you dreamed up? Or your very own Bitcoin miner You can do all this with FPGAs. Because you're not writing programs--rather, you're designing a chip whose sole purpose is to do what you tell it--it's faster than anything you can do in code. With Make: FPGAs, you'll learn how to break down problems into something that can be solved on an FPGA, design the logic that will run on your FPGA, and hook up electronic components to create finished projects.

'This book collects the best practices FPGA-based Prototyping of SoC and ASIC devices into one place for the first time, drawing upon not only the authors'own knowledge but also from leading practitioners worldwide in order to present a snapshot of best practices today and possibilities for the future.The book is organized into chapters which appear in the same order as the tasks and decisions which are performed during an FPGA-based prototyping project. We start by analyzing the challenges and benefits of FPGA-based Prototyping and how they compare to other prototyping methods. We present the current state of the available FPGA technology and tools and how to get started on a project. The FPMM also compares between home-made and outsourced FPGA platforms and how to analyze which will best meet the needs of a given project. The central chapters deal with implementing an SoC design in FPGA technology including clocking, conversion of memory, partitioning, multiplexing and handling IP amongst many other subjects. The important subject of bringing up the design on the FPGA boards is covered next, including the introduction of the real design into the board, running embedded software upon it in and debugging and iterating in a lab environment. Finally we explore how the FPGA-based Prototype can be linked into other verification methodologies, including RTL simulation and virtual models in SystemC.