Protected power calculation spread sheets

My first response would be to ask the FPGA vendor. Explain your problem and see what they suggest. It's in their interest to make this as easy as possible for you, and I've always found them helpful.

Alternatively, you can probably convince your AV software to ignore files you place in certain subdirectories or some such. It depends on whose AV software you use.

Bill

---------------------------- rickman wrote:

You could also put the file into any password protected archive, like ZIP. This way antivirus will see the archive, but will not scan its contents.

WBR, Vladimir Mirgorodsky

Bill Mart> My first response would be to ask the FPGA vendor. Explain your problem and

see

You might give this a try if the vendor won't give you the password -

I haven't gotten that far yet. I can't even find how to tell it I want to unprotect it. I guess I'll just have to tell the AVS to skip this file.

James T. White wrote:

Hi Rick,

I am guessing you are trying to use Altera's Early Power Estimator, since as best as I know Xilinx only has the web thing. Please send me the details on your problem -- the anti-virus software you are using, exact error message, and version & target architecture of the EPE you are using.

Sheet protection & code hiding are used for a few reasons. First, to protect our users from themselves -- we would probably have a lot of "bugs", or worse "bad estimates" that were actually due to a copy-and-paste gone mad. Trust me, I've done that to myself enough times with the unprotected version. Second, we would rather not have to explain exactly how everything works under the hood, and we wouldn't want to share those workings with our competitors. Sure, password cracking is readily available, but I am unsure of the legality (never mind the ethics) of using such a technique, particularly for competitive analysis purposes.

Regards,

Paul Leventis Altera Corp.

Paul,

Thanks for your interest. Yes, this is an Altera spread sheet, but I seem to recall having one from Xilinx as well, but that would be pretty old by now. This one is old too, I'm just a pack rat when it come to my hard drive.

I'm not going to worry about it further. This is only two blips in a very lengthly error report. The AVS is Sophos and it makes multiple reports on some files when they are accessed and list the same error several hundred times. I'm not sure what is up with that, but it may have to do with AV scans being done on the same hard drive by two different machines at the same time.

It just happened that these two files were the first in the report so I tackled them first. I have since moved on to more fruitful error reports.