does anybody have experience in using Altium DXP for designing Xilinx FPGA? Is it possible to compile Xilinx libraries (unisim/coregenlib/simprim) for using them in DXP? DXP is not supported by Xilinx, what are the risks in using it?
I evaluated DXP but unfortunately it expired before I got to the FPGA/VHDL part, from what I hear from others it is a decent tool, again , I don't have specifics.
I think this si a valid question in this newsgroup, instead of lecturing people maybe you should try to help them! It would fit more with the spirit of this newsgroup!
Sorry about that. Well, I didn't come this far with DXP yet. Obviously this poster was not aware of the Altium groups. They are a definite must for every DXP user anyway. Perhaps a more knowledgeable DXP user knows an answer here.
Protel or Altium as they are now called.. have a long and very good users group. It is referenced by Altium but I doubt there are many VHDL users there as Protel is a PCB CAD package which has only lately started doing VHDL.
You can Try tho.. but you have to have an official licensed version of DXP ;-)
I use DXP for PCB work and like it very much. I like the way it organizes projects and find it interesting that it can handle FPGAs, but don't see that as very practical since the two that it supports (Xilinx and Altera) both offer synthesis tools with their free toolsets. I can't say which is a better synthesizer, but I'd expect the FPGA manufacturers would have the upper hand on that.
You can, however, draw schematics with Protel and compile them. This would be a much better solution if you wanted to go the schematic route. (since the schematic capture program (ECS) included with Xilinx tools is about as convenient to work with as little pieces of paper cutout like the symbols and using twigs to make connectivity) You can use the standard symbols with DXP, and I would expect something to deal with Cores, but haven't delved into it much.
I have not upgraded to DXP, but use the previous software, Protel 99SE. It was supposed to have Xilinx support, but I found a raft of stuff that didn't work. The schematic part of the Xilinx ISE tools drives me crazy, however, and so I have been experimenting with linking Protel99 to ISE, and finally got it to work. Protel's EDIF format is totally fouled up, and their XNF output is close, but has some subtle bugs that I was never able to figure out. But, the undocumented VHDL output is almost perfect. To use the Xilinx schematic library parts, you have to manually add a library declaration and a use statement for that library to the VHDL file. That looks like :
library unisim; use unisim.vcomponents.all;
The only other quirk is that Protel repeats the "component" declaration of a schematic sheet that is used more than once in the same schematic. I can now edit in these small changes in a few seconds.
If you want to do Xilinx FPGAs in Verilog or VHDL, just forget Protel, the Xilinx tools are going to be much more current, and I'd trust their optimization a lot more than anyone else's. Note that Xilinx's own software dropped all support for all 5 V chips about
3 years ago! That's why I'm still using ISE 4.1i, because all my work is with 5 V chips at the moment.
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.