Anyone done any "what-if" remapping of Virtex-II designs to Virtex-4? I wanted to do this to see how the new technology performed, mainly to see if it was worth the trouble to upgrade some existing designs. We did this quite successfully some years back, stepping from Virtex-E to Virtex-II. The main obstacle then was the new size Block RAM going from
4kbit to 18 kbit apiece. If we left our Unisim and CoreLib components untouched we wasted 3/4 of the RAM, but if the number of Block RAMs in the chip was sufficient, all we had to do was to update the LOC-constraints for pins and DCM's in the .ucf-file. ISE even managed to re-target the Virtex-E DLLs to Virtex-II DCMs. Brilliant!So I hoped it would be even better this time, since the Block RAMs are the same size, but there seems to be more to this than meets the eye. I commented out all the LOC-constraints in the ucf and had a go, after resynthesizing to XC4VLX instead of XC2V. But alas, I get a fatal error in MAP, complaining about SLICEL and SLICEM types of components. I suspect that this has to do with some of our CoreLib components, since they are the only place where there might be RLOC constraints in the EDIF, but before I go and re-generate all these I am curious to know if there is an easier way.
I am not out to squeeze the full performance out of the XC4VLX right now, but would like a "ball-park" figure of what might be expected in terms of utilization and speed, before we go ahead and commit to a full-scale conversion. That is why I don't want to spend too much time.
Regards, /Lars