I'm looking at doing a design with Apex-II parts and will probably need to use the Verilog synthesizer that comes with Quartus. My last experience (multiple years ago) was very unpleasant - lots of synthesis bugs. Has this gotten better? My experience with XST synthesis recently has been pretty good, so I'm debating about sticking with Xilinx for this next project or jumping to Altera since their Apex-II parts seem to fit my application a bit better. Any goog/bad stories? Thanks! John Providenza
Looking for recent Altera Quartus Verilog synthesis experience
Started by ●October 1, 2003
Reply by ●October 1, 20032003-10-01
John Providenza wrote:> I'm looking at doing a design with Apex-II parts and will > probably need to use the Verilog synthesizer that comes with > Quartus. My last experience (multiple years ago) was very > unpleasant - lots of synthesis bugs.Yes, synthesis used to be unusable.> Has this gotten better?Yes, it seems to work quite well now. I'm still using leo for production work until I spend some time qualifying it.> My experience with XST synthesis recently has been pretty good, > so I'm debating about sticking with Xilinx for this next project > or jumping to Altera since their Apex-II parts seem to fit my > application a bit better.That's a tough call. If you want to reuse code Xilinx-only code I would stay. If it's mostly new code, I would go. -- Mike Treseler
Reply by ●October 1, 20032003-10-01
Starting with Quartus II 2.2 Altera replaced their VHDL and Verilog HDL synthesis front ends with the parsers from Verific www.verific.com , to greatly improve the language coverage and the correctness of the synthesis solution. With each subsequent release several improvements have been made in improving the quality of the synthesis solution in Quartus, including inferencing run times and optimizing the area versus fmax choices. The Quartus synthesis solution is available as part of the free Quartus Web Edition. https://www.altera.com/support/software/download/altera_design/quartus_we/dn l-quartus_we.jsp - Subroto Datta Altera Corp. "John Providenza" <johnp3+nospam@probo.com> wrote in message news:349ef8f4.0310010922.254c437a@posting.google.com...> I'm looking at doing a design with Apex-II parts and will > probably need to use the Verilog synthesizer that comes with > Quartus. My last experience (multiple years ago) was very > unpleasant - lots of synthesis bugs. > > Has this gotten better? > > My experience with XST synthesis recently has been pretty good, > so I'm debating about sticking with Xilinx for this next project > or jumping to Altera since their Apex-II parts seem to fit my > application a bit better. > > Any goog/bad stories? > > Thanks! > > John Providenza
Reply by ●October 2, 20032003-10-02
Followup to: <349ef8f4.0310010922.254c437a@posting.google.com> By author: johnp3+nospam@probo.com (John Providenza) In newsgroup: comp.arch.fpga> > I'm looking at doing a design with Apex-II parts and will > probably need to use the Verilog synthesizer that comes with > Quartus. My last experience (multiple years ago) was very > unpleasant - lots of synthesis bugs. > > Has this gotten better? > > My experience with XST synthesis recently has been pretty good, > so I'm debating about sticking with Xilinx for this next project > or jumping to Altera since their Apex-II parts seem to fit my > application a bit better. >I have recently used Altera's Cyclone device as well as supported a legacy project with APEX20K. The recent versions of Quartus seem to do quite well; 2.2SP2 was OK and 3.0 seems to be better. That being said, I have found that at least the webpack versions of both the Xilinx and Altera packages have simulations that are all but unusable. It hasn't been a big deal for me as I have had access to logic analyzers and have had debugging pins available on the board. That being said, I doubt either of these tools would do a hugely good job optimizing very complex "far from hardware" idioms. -hpa -- <hpa@transmeta.com> at work, <hpa@zytor.com> in private! If you send me mail in HTML format I will assume it's spam. "Unix gives you enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot." Architectures needed: ia64 m68k mips64 ppc ppc64 s390 s390x sh v850 x86-64