more than 90% occupancy in an Actel FPGA

Hi to everyone, I'm using an Actel fuse A54SX72A, which has 2012 sequential cells and at the moment I filled it up to more than 90%. There can be the need more triple-redundant registers in it and I'm afraid I will have routing problems with that. Has anyone here experienced this? Can I rely on the Actel Designer backannotate to have a close-to-reality simulation?

Thanks a lot

--
Alessandro Basili
CERN, PH/UGC
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
alessandro basili
Loading thread data ...

Hi Alessandro,

Once I got it up to 100%! So you still have some cells to spare.

Routing depends on your design structure. Even with high device utilization, Designer usually is successful. If routing fails or you can't get timing closure, you can try place&route with the "Multiple Passes" option.

Certainly. You can export the netlist together with the SDF to perform gate-level simulation with effective cell and routing delays.

Daniel Leu Inicore, Inc.

Reply to
Daniel Leu

I will try it, thanks. Does it have any drawback?

I thought that this is what the back-annotate does, am I wrong? I usually do the back-annotate and then do the post-layout simulation with Model-Sim (unfortunately by the mean of Libero IDE, that I personally hate, but still didn't have time to make rid of it). What do you mean by "gate-level simulation"?

--
Alessandro Basili
CERN, PH/UGC
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
alessandro basili

Longer runtime.

Yes, this is what I meant. You should be able to run the back-annotated with Modelsim without Libero.

Regards, Daniel Leu Inicore, Inc.

Reply to
Daniel Leu

Hi,

alessandro basili schrieb:

It cost only time by doing effectly several runs and using the best result (you could even have the results from all runs saved on HD) I think, that timing critical layout gets a bigger problem if your utilisation is >>95% (YMMV I had only one A54SX72 design exceeding 95% sequential resources).

I never used the IDE, what causes your pain? The export of netlist and sdf from designer tool is very simple (I wish all Vendors would allow such a simple export of data in their tools).

bye Thomas

Reply to
Thomas Stanka

To be more precise it only takes more than 90% of the sequential logic, so that's why I'm not yet having any trouble, because I think that the major problem will occur when you have a lot of combinational logic to go through. (By the way, what does YMMV mean???)

The Designer is very easy to use and I appreciated it a lot, my only problem is that all my collegues used to make projects with LIBERO IDE and I had to adapt myself to their standards. Now I only use Libero to set up all the directories in such a way I'm used to, but then I use Synplify by itself and Modelsim as well. Libero is only handy when it creates the .do script file for Modelsim and goes through the post-synthesis or the post-layout simulation just in case you have exported the back-annotate from the Designer.

--
Alessandro Basili
CERN, PH/UGC
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
Al

Hi,

Al schrieb:

Both *g*. Of course is the number of gates in a path important for the timing. But your longest path is very likely dominated by routing delay. You will typically have some bad routings exceeding the gate delay of 4-5 gates if your resource usage is high.

Just open layout tool and timing analyiser in parallel to see the influence of layout on your timing. You will easily see some registers, that should be moved to improve timing, but high resource usage disables the possibility to put them close together without worsening other delays.

Your mileage may vary

formatting link

bye Thomas

Reply to
Thomas Stanka

ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.