Enhanced Software Slashes FPGA Design Cycles

Powered by the new SmartCompile technology, release 9.1i of the Xilinx Integrated Software Environment (ISE) design suite for FPGAs is optimized to address the challenges of timing closure, productivity, and power consumption. In addition to 2.5X faster runtimes, SmartCompile improves runtimes by up to an additional 6X while maintaining exact design preservation of unchanged logic. ISE 9.1i also optimizes the unique ExpressFabric technology of its latest 65-nm Virtex-5 platform, delivering an average of 30% faster performance than competing solutions. For power-sensitive applications, the latest version reduces dynamic power by an average of 10%.

The upgraded design suite also addresses the increasing sophistication of FPGA designers with a number of user interface enhancements, including a tcl command console to easily transition from the ISE graphical user interface to a command line environment, and a source-code compatibility function that identifies the files necessary to recreate results, which can be imported and exported for source control. All versions of the ISE 9.1i software packages support Windows 2000, Windows XP Professional, and Linux Red Hat Enterprise 3.0 and 4.0. ISE Foundation also supports Solaris 2.8 and 2.9.