EDA & Development
to be analysed on a computer. Altium Limited has taken this concept to a
new level with a range of configurable virtual instruments supplied as part of its Altium Designer system. These instruments are highly configurable and come with sophisticated PC- based dashboards to allow designers to stimulate and probe signal lines inside the FPGA in a similar manner to a board-level designer working with bench test instruments.
Burn and learn!
Simulation plays a vital part in electronics
design at many levels, and will continue to do so. But the products we are designing are becoming more complex and increasingly interconnected. The challenge in designing the next generation of electronics devices is finding ways to wrangle this complexity and keep it manageable during development. Basically, we need to find new ways to do design. FPGAs offer a way forward in that they can
NanoBoard 3000
Altium has recently launched an innovative new family of FPGA-based development boards. The NanoBoard 3000 series smart FPGA system development board comes with everything a board-level electronics system designer needs to extend their skills into programmable system design. What makes the NanoBoard 3000 smart is the sophisticated on- board controller firmware that works hand-in- glove with the included Altium Designer software to form a complete, flexible and extremely easy to use FPGA-based development system. The NanoBoard 3000 has a wide array of hardware features, ranging from a high-quality stereo audio subsystem to a QVGA touch screen. The board also has a host of standard peripherals and connection options, all directly accessible from the on-board FPGA and covered by both FPGA-based and software IP that comes with the board. Designers work graphically with high-level
bring many of the benefits of a software approach to design to the creation of system hardware.
They allow
changes to be made quickly and at no cost, and they also allow hardware functionality to be programmed and altered after manufacture. To harness these benefits, however, we need to abandon our current reliance on simulation in the development cycle of these programmable chips. This is a crucial step in changing our perception of these devices from a component is a system to the system itself. If we raise our eyes and look up from the
simulation for a moment, we may find that simply making real hardware straight off gets us to where we want to go much quicker and easier. After all, in the FPGA world, if it reality doesn’t work the first time, we can rebuild it in the blink of an eye.
Altium |
www.altium.com
Rob Irwin is Product Manager at Altium Ltd.
design blocks to build an application - the system takes care of the low-level tasks, such as linking output signals to the right pins on the FPGA to connect with the board hardware. Designers can also draw inspiration from more than 120 working reference designs included in the Altium Designer software. Altium Designer contains a huge library of royalty-free, ready-to-use IP that lets designers use every aspect of the NanoBoard 3000 without having to create any low level logic hardware or driver software. FPGA-based components include 32-bit processor cores and typical processor system peripherals, as well as a variety of software stacks that can be used to drive the peripherals. The NanoBoard 3000 lets designers construct and develop sophisticated ‘soft’ processor- based systems without any prior FPGA expertise. They can move functionality off the PCB and create next-generation electronic products that connect and interact with the world via the Web. With the NanoBoard 3000 they can focus on innovation and rapidly develop and prototype their ideas.
www.cieonline.co.uk
Components in Electronics April 2010 37
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