From ASIC RTL to FPGA, what are the things I should take care of?

Question

I have a project to prototype an ASIC design on FPGA. What are the things I should do? Here is some of my concerns:

1) I understand FPGAs usually have 4 look-up table. Should I rewrite the ASIC combinational logics to be four-inputs logics to improve the utilization of FPGA?

2) Netting if and case statements over three layers might results a poor synthesis result in FPGA . Should I changes those netting codes in ASIC RTL?

3) ASIC synthesis need to generate clock tree and power rails. In FPGA synthesis, Maybe I not need to care too much about it?

4) Is there a to-do-list for this kind of job?

Thank you for any advices.

info2 · Accepted Answer

1) no, unless you are given the opportunity to get old doing this project 2) see 1 3) yes 4) Yes, your 1st and only point: give it to a third party

It seems somebody gave you the wrong job, because you neither have experience with fpga nor asic design. At least basic experience with FPGA would be needed.

Dwayne Dilbeck · Answer

ASIC protoyping using FPGAs is a common enough occurance. There are multiple low priced tool vendors that specialize in this area. It is best not to re-invent the wheel. Rather look up the tool vendors and let thier tools handle the FPGA mapping issues.

The following paper can give you more insight into the process. I doubt you will find any FPGA protoype vendors in this paper, Since Mentor has a cycle based emulator that they compete against the fpgra protoypes with.

formatting link

Ralf Hildebrandt · Answer

jasonL schrieb:Well .. good HDL code should be portable. ;-)No. Usually the FPGA is big enough. This is an advanced topic forhighly-optimized designs.Flipflops are free in FPGAs. Therefore you can pipeline your designeasily. The only disadvantage are the additional clocks through thepipeline.Ususally you should place an instance of a component, that tells thesynthesis tool to use global clocks and global signals for reset. ForXilinx this it a BUFG.Usually I replace memories with BlockRAM inside the FPGA and useinstances of clock buffers. Thats it.Fully synchronous designs are easily done on FPGAs, but even highlyclock-gated designs using a lot of latches run quite fine.Ralf

jasonL · Answer

Thank you all for the helps. It seems that a good synthesizer will doa lot of help.

From ASIC RTL to FPGA, what are the things I should take care of?

Join the Discussion

Didn't find your answer?