Using 6.1.03i. Pondering whether or not to spend the money to update to latest revision. The devices we are using are fully supported by what we currently have. No real issues at all.
That being the case, what would be the most significant reasons that would justify an upgrade today?
Thanks,
-Martin
Martin,
Generally speaking, if there is no reason to change, then change is probably not worth it.
Any change has to be requalified (by you), and that can be expensive.
However, the new tools also do a better job of routing, and placing, and you may get a whole speed grade improvement by using the newer tools (even with an older family part).
If you are presently using a faster than slowest speed grade part, or you can use more speed to better advantage, then upgrading to the latest and best tools have benefit.
Austin
Howdy Austin,
Not knowing which device(s) he is using, I don't think that can be said any longer:
(which implies to me that higher speed and/or density designs in the older families [Virtex, Virtex-E, Spartan-II and Spartan-IIE] probably should stick with 6.3).
Best regards,
Marc
V2 and V2P.
Generally using the middle speed grade. In the case of V2P it's not because of logic speed (plenty of it, even for the low speed grade), its because of MGT clock rate requirements.
-Martin
If I had a choice, I'd stick with the tool version that successfully produced the initial version of my design.
Except, that is, for one thing: speed files.
If you're absolutely confident that the speed files for your current version of software reflect the latest timing numbers for your part, or if you have so much timing margin that you have no concerns about changes to the speed files, stick with what you've got. But if any of your timing is tight, check with the factory to see if you're up to date.
By the way, I just used my 7.1.03i version of speedprint on the 2v3000 and 2vp70. Here's what it reported;
2v3000: PRODUCTION 1.121 2005-05-13 2vp70: PRODUCTION 1.91 2005-05-13Can the factory send you new speed files that work with your current software? Beats me. I know one or two folks who have managed to obtain special versions of updated speed files that work with older versions of the software. But I've also been told that sometimes it's impossible to do, because newer speed files may have formats incompatible with older versions of the tool, the newer formats being necessary for more accurate timing calculations. Or so I've heard.
Good luck, Bob Perlman Cambrian Design Works
Thanks all for your replies on this subject.
-Martin
If you use EDK then I would suggest updating as a lot of improvements in the cores, software debugging, GCC and OS support have been introduced among other things. If it is just ISE, then I think what the other respondents said matches my position.
Rob> Thanks all for your replies on this subject.
Unless you are using a device that isn't supported by the 6.2SP3 you should wait for the 8.1 series which hopefully will be better then 7.1. The 7.1 series has been much buggier then usual. The latest service pack seems to have cleared up a lot of the bugs but the performance of 7.1SP3 is still worse then 6.2SP3. Map takes forever on 7.1 and the ultimate results are generally worse then for 6.2SP3.
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