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EASE Features
The project browser provides a good overview and offers easy access to the design elements.
The browser offers two views: the object view shows a tree of all elements in your
project and the hierarchical view shows the HDL hierarchy of your project.
It also provides many status details of the different objects, like verification status,
'instantiated from' info, version number and more. From the browser, all objects can be
opened in their respective editor (block, state, truth table or text editor).
The hierarchical view shows the hierarchy on the selected entity or configuration.
It allows you to create or delete configurations.
Here you can also changes the binding of an architecture to a component
when having multiple architectures for an entity.
Block Diagram Editor
The block diagram editor allows you to easily decompose your system
into functional blocks. It is up to you how detailed you want to make the decomposition.
Each block can be implemented using one of the four available editors.
Facilitating an abstraction level between block diagrams and plain HDL code,
the block diagram editor allows you to graphically represent VHDL processes or
Verilog always statements. They can be implemented using state diagrams,
truth tables or HDL text. This approach visualizes the data flow inside a single diagram.
The state diagram editor supports Moore, Mealy and
mixed state machines. Any valid VHDL expression or Verilog statement
can be used to define actions and transition conditions. Transitions
can be synchronous or asynchronous; outputs can be clocked or combinatorial.
The state diagram editor supports a variety of state assignment
methods, including binary, gray, one-hot and two-hot. User defined
assignment is also supported. The generated HDL is optimized for
time and area to achieve the best possible synthesized design from
leading synthesis tools.
The truth table editor is useful for decoders and decision logic. The spreadsheet like editor in
combination with a flexible and smart use of column headers allows a compact visualization
of the intended behavior.
A column-fill wizard is available to generate data in various encoding styles and representations.
Scriptum - Internal Text Editor
EASE comes complete with its own integrated HDL language editor,
Scriptum. Even on extremely large files Scriptum offers exceptionally
fast editing capabilities. You can avoid typing errors and dramatically
improve your productivity by using keyword and header templates,
identifier repeat, auto case conversion and one-touch line and column
manipulation. To keep your text highly readable and well structured,
you may choose syntax coloring and in- and out-commenting of selected
text, as well as line numbering and indentation.
Scriptum offers extensive documentation capabilities such as color
coding, capitalization and indentation to make your numerous lines of
code more readable.
Scriptum is fully customizable to create a design environment that meets
your needs. Design language, synthesis templates, keyword templates,
and user interface are easily tailored to your requirements.
External HDL files like IP, legacy code, Matlab code and FPGA generated models
can be integrated in your project as external objects. EASE will create symbols
and component declarations for instantiated modules. Symbols can be easily updated
to the latest version of your code.
Existing HDL can also be translated into block diagrams.
Symbol libraries for FPGA primitives can be created on the fly from vendor VHDL or Verilog descriptions.
Verification and linting
Before VHDL or Verilog is generated EASE verifies the design for inconsistencies and syntax errors.
Linting is an additional verification effort to find potential design problems
(like range mismatches in assignments of vectors, or read-only signals) and optimize
the design by identifying unused signals and definitions.
Errors, warnings and notes are reported in the verification pane.
The messages are hot-linked to the corresponding editor to quickly navigate to the offending code.
Many FPGA's and ASIC's are designed by a team of engineers that need to work closely
together to finish the implementation correct and on time.
The best way to work together on a project is by using a design environment that
allows a group of designers to simultaneously work on the project without interfering
with each other. EASE supports team based design using industry standard version
management systems like RCS, CVS, ClearCase and Subversion.
All designers in the team can check-in/check-out objects at the entity/module level.
This fine grain control allows you to edit the parts that you need to work on while
your colleagues can still read these parts.
3rd Party Interfacing
EASE has a user configurable third party tool flow interface.
A wizard will help the user to select the appropriate tools and set
the options for these tools.
Extra tool buttons will be added to the GUI for easy access to the
selected tools.
A list of tools supported by default is provided below.
Other tools or vendors are easily added through the Tcl interface.
Simulation tools:
- ModelSim (Model Technology's )
- NCSim, Verilog-XL (Cadence)
- Silos (Silvaco)
- Riviera (Aldec)
- VCS (Synopsys)
Synthesis tools:
- Synplify (Synplicity)
- Leonardo Spectrum(Exemplar Logic)
- Design Compiler family (Synopsys)
The FPGA Vendor tools from:
The HTML Generator generator allows you to export the whole project on
your intranet or to the internet. With a single click EASE will export
all diagrams, side data, generated HDL code and the project structure
to the desired location in HTML and SVG files. SVG (Scalable Vector
Graphics) is the W3C standard XML-based imaging model started by Adobe.
Graphics created in SVG can be scaled without loss of quality across
various platforms and devices.
The exported HTML contains hot links in the diagrams and the project
structure to easily navigate through your design.
Mixed VHDL and Verilog Example
Standards Support
EASE's code generator produces HDL output conforming
to IEEE-1076-87 and IEEE-1076-93 VHDL standards, as well as the
IEEE-1364 Verilog standard. EASE also supports the industry's leading
simulators and synthesis tools, as well as version control features
when provided.
Hardware Platforms & Operating Systems
- PC
Windows 2000/XP/Vista
Linux (should work with any recent distribution). Tested with RHEL 4 and Suse 10.1
- Sun SPARC
Solaris 2.7 or later
System Requirements
- 75 MB free disk space
- 256 MB system RAM (512 MB recommended)
License Configurations
- Node-Locked: Windows
- Floating: Windows 2000/XP/Vista, Solaris, Linux
- FlexLM protected
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