I/O Designer

I/O Designer is the foundation for an effective FPGA/PCB co-design process. I/O Designer supports the latest devices offered by the FPGA vendors and can quickly convert an FPGA design into a PCB schematic, ready for layout.

In addition, I/O Designer provides correct-by-construction FPGA I/O assignment, allowing pin swapping and layout-based I/O optimization within the PCB process.

Features and Benefits

  • Provides bi-directional integration, data management and the ability to perform concurrent design of your FPGA and PCB
  • Focused on optimizing system performance, designer productivity and reducing product manufacturing costs
  • Eliminates the barriers between FPGA and PCB flows and design organizations
  • Reduces PCB Manufacturing costs by eliminating PCB signal layers
  • Makes achieving high-speed constraints possible
  • Reduces the total product design cycle time by changing a serial process into a concurrent process
  • Eliminates PCB re-spins due to bad FPGA symbols on the PCB
  • Eliminates the costs associated with creating and maintaining the FPGA symbol(s) for the PCB schematic

Technical Overview

I/O Designer offers a unique process for moving through the design flow, from the top level HDL description to the PCB level symbol, as well as to the physical pin information necessary for the FPGA place and route tools.

I/O Designer offers a central solution for the digital design engineer performing the HDL design and the physical implementation of the FPGA, as well as for the board designer using the device symbol.

Design process optimization and version control

I/O Designer does not only automate the schematic connectivity required for PCB layout and verification, but also document which signal connections are made to which device pins and indicate how these pins map to the original board-level bus structures. With I/O Designer and a close collaboration between the parallel paths of FPGA and PCB design, weeks and months can be trimmed from FPGA design and implementation schedule along with significant overall cost savings in the long term. I/O Designer has built-in data management capabilities that enables the designers to jointly work on the integration of an FPGA on the board and to keep track of every change made by any one of them even if they are located on disperse locations.

Consistency bridge between FPGA and PCB environments

I/O Designer manages the consistency between the FPGA and PCB flows by acting as a data management tool, monitoring each flow and managing any changes that occur. Pin swaps carried out on the PCB are picked up by I/O Designer and the necessary files updated. I/O Designer then generates FPGA place and route constraints, based on the HDL design and pin I/O assignment process, and creates the necessary symbols, schematics and hierarchical associations based on the “postroute" pin data.

Symbol Creation in Mentor Graphics native schematic formats

I/O Designer supports most industry symbol standards by offering a customizable library of pin and symbol shapes. It also offers advanced features for the importing and exporting of symbols and schematics.

Import and Export native symbols and schematics

  • DesignView
  • Design Capture
  • DxDesigner
  • Design Architect
  • Board Architect

In addition to that import schematic symbols:

  • LMS
  • EDIF
  • XML

Graphical Interface

I/O Designer also provides an easy to use interface that contains a schematic symbol window that allows signals or pins to be dragged and dropped and a graphical display of footprints to map signals to pins. This interface allows for on-the-fly updates that are immediately reflected within the Mentor PCB tools and then written out to the FPGA tools.

Optimize Layout

  • FPGA pin assignment with place & route
  • Intelligent I/O design
  • All pin information available during I/O design
  • PCB layout optimization
  • Pinswap back-annotation

System Requirements

Hardware Platforms

  • PC
  • Sun SPARCstation
  • HP 9000/700

Operating Systems

  • Windows 2000, XP
  • Solaris 2.6 or later
  • HP-UX 10.20 or later
  • RedHat Linux 7.0 or later

License Configuration

  • Time based
  • Floating: Windows 2000, XP, Solaris, HP-UX, Linux
  • FlexLM protected

System Requirements

  • 24 MB free disk space
  • 64 MB system RAM recommended

Supported FPGA Vendors

Supported FPGA Vendors include Actel, Altera, Lattice and Xilinx. Check out a a complete a list of supported vendor devices. Learn More

FPGA Device Support By Release

Datasheet

Toolbox

“With Expedition PCB and I/O Designer, a structured design environment was created where a highspeed, high density PCB design was combined with the FPGA design.”

- H.J. Pepping, ASTRON

Success Stories

A Fundamentally Different Approach to FPGA I/O Design

How Agilent Used I/O Designer to Achieve Radical Reductions in Design Cycle Time. View

Astron Reduces Time to Market with I/O Designer

ASTRON sees design time savings and improved time to market, as well as better overall designs. View

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