Hi,
It's been a couple of years since I've been a heavy FPGA user, but it appears that I'll now be getting back into them. As of a few years back, I was using Xilinx Virtex IIe parts and was quite happy with them... I kept up with what Altera was doing as well, and while it always seemed to me that for DSP applications Xilinx tended to have the edge, in many ways Xilnx and Altera were the Coke and Pepsi of FPGAs -- both were good, solid products where either could have gotten the job done in the vast majority of applications.
Where I am now there's been some historical use of the Actel 54SX parts, something I've never used. However, I do recall that -- as of a few years ago -- the deal with Actel was always that the parts were antifuse-based, so while you _might_ be able to gain something in speed, you gave up a lot in the way of being able to issue field upgrades, bug fixes, etc. However, I now see that Actel has their ProASIC line of parts so they can perhaps compete somewhat closer to Xilinx and Altera than previously. Could anyone summarize how the ProASIC parts stack up to the contemporary Xilinx and Altera parts? (E.g., Xilinx Virtex II or 4, Altera Stratix II.) In particular I'm interested in:
-- DSP usage. Things seemed to get a lot easier when Xilinx starrted introducing fixed DSP blocks (e.g., multiply-accumulate blocks) within the FPGA fabric.
-- Embedded processor usage. I never used them, but Xilinx and Altera's embeeded "soft cores" (microblaze and NIOS) both seemed pretty neat, and Xilinx was offering ARM hard cores if you really wanted "big iron."
-- Debugging support. Xilinx had some "soft probe" thing that would let you poke around the internal nets of the FPGA as it was running, and I believe Altera had something like this even before Xilinx.
-- Tool support. I used to use Synplify for VHDL synthesis, which worked quite well. I tried Xilinx's built-in synthesis tool, and given the price (vs. Synplify), it was really pretty good as well.
How does Actel performs in these area? I realize they're very general questions, but I'm trying to get a feeling for how viable ProASICs are for something like a software defined radio (i.e., plenty of "real" DSP, desire for some "supervisory" soft core CPU, etc.) vs. just going with what I know would work -- Xilinx or Altera.
Thanks,
---Joel Kolstad