Development tools for D-Fabrix, Elixent's reconfigurable algorithm processing (RAP) technology, have been upgraded. This means greatly enhanced performance for the D-Sign v1.4 tool suite, including a 4× drop in synthesis times and placement speed. As a result, design productivity goes up while development time goes down.
The upgraded tools include full support for v1.2 of the D-Fabrix architecture and VHDL. The D-Fabrix architecture employs reconfigurable arrays of arithmetic elements. Algorithms can be mapped and changed post-fabrication on these arrays, allowing bugs to be fixed or the chip to be reused in a new application. Based on a new "place-and-route" technology, D-Sign v1.4 improves the mapping of an application onto the array. Gains in speed and utilization of up to 20% are achievable, boosting performance and density by more than 40%.
D-Sign v1.4 lets users automatically exploit the power-saving features of the v1.2 architecture--improved clock gating (which allows unused parts of the array to be turned off) and power-down/standby modes. The standby mode reduces power to just 1/1000 that of an FPGA. The VHDL support in D-Sign v1.4 now includes the full synthesizable subset of the IEEE1076-2002 definition of the language. This is in addition to the tool's existing comprehensive implementation of IEEE 1364.1 Verilog. Tool cost is part of a negotiated technology license agreement, but existing licensees can upgrade at no cost.
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