Processors - Direct Insight Support for Embedded Cores on Xilinx FPGAs

Devices:
We offer cores for Xilinx from Altium within the Nexar toolsuite, including 8051, PIC165 and Z80 processors and peripherals.

Summary:
As FPGA densities increase, it becomes increasingly viable to implement embedded systems by running a pre-synthesized processor within the programmable device. As experts in both embedded design and FPGA design, we are specialists in supporting this fusion of technologies.

Highlights:

FPGA toolset incorporating processor cores: Altium Nexar
Altium Nexar includes three processor cores for Xilinx devices:
8051, PIC165 and Z80. These, as well as an OSEK RTOS for the 8051, ship royalty free, compilers and debuggers included, with the Nexar environment.

Nexar is a schematic-oriented FPGA development environment which is designed to allow embedded developers to rapidly implement designs on FPGA. Extensive pre-synthesized libraries include a wide variety of peripherals as well as processor cores. These components are connected together at the system level using a schematic editor. Users can add their own library elements via hierarchical schematics and/or VHDL.

Additional library elements include a range of "soft" instruments such as logic analyzers and frequency counters, which are temporarily instantiated in the target FPGA for debugging purposes, and accessed in real-time via a JTAG chain. These, plus a development breadboard - the "NanoBoard" - form the basis of a pragmatic development environment which substitutes experimentation for simulation.

The embedded development environment is based on Altium's industry standard TASKING toolset, with Viper compiler technology, which gives surprisingly high performance for the FPGA cores.

Debug Solution for Xilinx PowerPC405: Corelis
Corelis emulators provide JTAG support for the Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGA PowerPC 405 core with unprecedented code download speeds. With Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGAs, designers can quickly architect, customize, and automatically generate custom PowerPC 405 processor systems. To enhance the productivity afforded by this innovative design methodology, Corelis has added direct support for Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGAs through their CodeRunner JTAG Debugger. A single emulator can support up to 4 instances of the PowerPC 405 or UltraController processor.