( ELSE 06 Item 15 ) -------------------------------------------- [ 06/23/06 ]
Subject: Synopsys DC-FPGA
NOT DEAD YET -- Although DC-FPGA was quietly end-of-lifed by Synopsys, I was
surprized to see that DC-FPGA use was still lingering in some design shops!
Hmmm -- I thought Synopsys DC-FPGA was dead.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
SNPS told us end of last year that they are dropping development of
DC-FPGA. Support for it will continue until end of the year then nada.
Apparently the ROI for their biz unit isn't enough to justify having
tool development. We wound up letting these licenses go and bought
Synplicity. Synplicity is decent and good enough for our purposes.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
I'm using Synplify Pro and DC-FPGA. Synplify Pro has a pretty simple
user interface which makes it easy to use. But it's only easy as long
as the design itself is easy. Once you have multiple timing exceptions
and have to use wildcards to specify them, Synplify will ignore them
under certain circumstances. Therefore, I switched to DC-FPGA, which
is from the user interface identical to DC. On the one hand you need
all the setups and libraries as for DC, but you can do everything up to
connecting/disconnecting nets. Synopsys still is introducing new bugs
with every new tool, e.g. in 2005.09 of DC-FPGA XG-mode is producing
incorrect netlists although XG-mode is successfully introduced for DC
since a few releases. I personally like to have control over everything
and therefore prefer to use DC-FPGA.
- Joerg Lindemann of Intel
Sadly we've (SNPS) discontinued DC-FPGA, but you know what? Customers
are still buying it! It's one of the only ways to use System Verilog
with an FPGA as the target. Use DC to do the initial synthesis, then
DC-FPGA can read the .db file. I don't believe that DC-FPGA can do
System Verilog, but according to several customers, this is a gaping
hole in the FPGA implementation flow for folks wanting to do System
Verilog. Synplicity crashes and burns; maybe one can hope that Mentor
supports it soon. As for the vendors? Hmmm, good luck.
- [ An Anon Synopsys Employee ]
Well knowing that there are FPGA tools on the market that might have
better usability and yield better quality of result, we use Synopsys
DC-FPGA for prototyping in our flow. The reason is that DC-FPGA has
the same look and feel, scripting and Synopsys DesignWare components
as Design Compiler. As we use FPGA only for real-time prototype and
system validation and always have ASICs as final target, DC-FPGA
minimizes the overhead to maintain both the intermediate FPGA and the
final ASIC flow.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
I don't like/use DC-FPGA due to poor documentation, large times for
synthesis, poor performance/area. Glad its going away!
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
I'm using both Synplify Pro and DC-FPGA for different reasons: Synplify
has a simple interface and is easy to use. So I get results quickly.
On the other hand Synplify Pro has some issues with complex constraining
(it's hard to create complex collections and apply timing exceptions to
them). Also interactive script debugging is not as easy as in DC-FPGA.
DC-FPGA supports the full TCL language (same as DC) and more or less the
same flexibility in constraining as DC. As Synopsys tools always have
been a bit buggy the same counts for DC-FPGA, but in Synopsys tools I
have the opportunities to workaround these bugs by scripting. I don't
have this option with Synplify Pro.
To sum up I use Synplify Pro for easy designs and DC-FPGA for designs
being complicated to constrain, e.g. old designs not being designed
for FPGA implementation.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
Simplify Pro has served us well over the years. Local support has been
good. We switched from Synopsys when Synplify first came out. Didn't
take much convincing when we could synthesis a design in minutes with a
click of a button compared to hours with Synopsys after taking days of
scripting training courses. I can see Synopsys DC-FPGA having its place
for people prototyping their Synopsys ASIC designs on FPGAs. We did
evaluate Mentor tools quite a while ago and found them to be comparable
to Synplify but gave us no compelling reason to switch from Synplify.
Have no idea how Synopsys tools are doing these days.
- Richard Hein of Agilent Technologies Canada
We use Synplify/Synplify Pro, and they work very well. We also have
some experience with Precision, and it works on some designs better
than others. XST would be OK if their language support was up to
snuff. It is fairly clear that Synopsys is quietly running away from
FPGAs as indicated by their deafening silence at the past two SNUGs.
How could they expect to make money when everyone around them does a
better job at a fraction of the cost? I think the 'high-end ASIC
prototype in FPGA' story was weak to begin with, and it has proven
to be the reality.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
Synplify Pro is a fine tool. Having struggled w/ previous incarnations
of FPGA Compiler, I wouldn't touch DC-FPGA with yours. We've dumped
all FPGA Compiler seats and moved to Synplify Pro.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
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