Re: pld design tools

>I was just looking at the download area on Lattice's web
>site, and they appear to be giving away a version of
>Synario.

The Lattice Synario package supports some Lattice CPLD's and all vendor's
PLD's (up to 22V10's and GAL6000's). It used to be $99 with books, sample
parts, and ISP download cable. Very nice-- supports ABEL HDL, schematic
entry, has a so-so JEDEC simulator. Works. I used it for the PAL on the
Sega Multigame.

For $500 you get the same thing, but instead of being Synario based it's
Viewlogic Workbench based and comes with all their tools and VHDL stuff.
If your company is big enough and you ask nicely enough they'll give you
one of these too. (Worked for me-- it comes with two of those !@#$!@
hardware keys that plug into the PC parallel port too... Grrrr...)

>Are these sorts of high level design tools available now
> from most other PLD vendors? I know Clay had said that
>he was thinking of using a Cypress PLD.

Cypress sells their Warp 2 VHDL system for $99. Is has a nice JEDEC
simulator (better than the Synario one, IMHO.) One of their application
engineers wrote a good VHDL book which comes with the package. It's a
college-type text that teaches VHDL. That's what I'm using to learn since
I only had one class with any HDL stuff in it in school.

Xilinx has always had expensive tools which they've been semi-reluctant to
give-away. Their representatives will usually give you an "eval" package
that's good for something like 256 synthesis runs. Since each time you try
to compile takes a run, so you can burn through it your first project just
learning the system. Usually their software is four-figure prices, but
they might be listening to customer demand more now. Last I talked to the
factory guys they said there was a $99 package with VHDL that was going to
come out Q1 of next year. They said it was going to go down to "free"
about six months later. Xilinx stuff is called "XACT"-- I've never liked
it much myself...

AMD has their own MACH XL stuff, which I've never used. It's hardware key
protected and I never saw much reason to fir it up on my system.

Those are the ones I know off the top of my head.

Oh, the Lattice VHDL stuff is kinda-odd. For *some* reason the
installation size depends on the cluster size of your hard-drive. I guess
it must use a bazillion little 1K files or something. (Eating up 32K
clusters on most IDE drives.) The software "requires" 100M "depending on
cluster size". My installation will require 550M free! Ack! It's bigger
than my Micro$oft apps...

-Clay

Clayton N. Cowgill Engineering Manager
_______________________________________________________________________
/\ Diamond Multimedia Systems, Inc. clay@supra.com
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Received on Thu Dec 18 16:23:06 1997