Xilinx FPGA Design Services

Verien Design Group provides Xilinx FPGA design services, as well as analog and board-level designs for a wide variety of markets. Verien's founder, Dave Matthews, has been designing Xilinx FPGAs since the XC3000 family, around 1993, and has designed with all Xilinx families since then. As a member of Xilinx third-party organization, the Alliance program (formerly Xperts), Verien shares a strong relationship with Xilinx.

Over the years, we have seen a steady migration from masked ASICs to FPGAs, as FPGAs increased in density and decreased proportionally in cost. The FPGAs of today are very different from the "glue-logic" FPGAs of yesterday; entire systems can be integrated in a single FPGA. Whereas we used to design the glue logic that binded the system together, today we are designing the whole system in the FPGA. Our typical FPGAs today include some amount of DSP logic, sometimes an embedded processor, memory interfaces, and high-speed links for communications.

The following sections describe some aspects of our Xilinx design services:

• High Performance Designs - High performance means different things to different people. We've designed cost sensitive Spartan-3 applications at 160 MHz in the slowest speed grade (see here for the project), as well as Virtex-5 designs with gigabit rates (PCI Express and proprietary links). For more information on our techniques, see our high performance design notes here.
  
  

• Communications and Networking Designs - Verien has direct design experience with the Xilinx gigabit transceivers and their applications to PCI Express and proprietary communications links. Other lower speed applications have been implemented with LVDS signaling. Actual bit rates for some of these designs were 500 Mbits/sec, 625 Mbits/sec, 1.2 Gbits/sec and 2.5 Gbits/sec (PCI Express). Additionally, Verien has experience in lower speed communications such as Controller Area Network (CAN), I²C, as well as high performance VoIP processing solutions. Verien also designed the board-level physical interfaces for most of these products.
  
  

• Cost Sensitive Designs - We've designed cost-sensitive consumer level products, products that have shipped over 100,000 units, and products that have shipped in the 100's. There are applications where pennies count, and applications where a higher cost allocated for future expansion in the FPGA fabric is prudent. For Xilinx designs, generally only the most demanding applications end up being implemented in the higher cost Virtex family FPGAs. The majority of our designs are implemented in the low cost Spartan or Artix-7 families.
  
  

• DSP Designs - Verien has designed many image processing systems including digital and infrared cameras, CAT scan and ultrasound processing chips, and other DSP-oriented applications. DSP designs can be either Matlab/Simulink with System Generator or HDL based methodologies. Often, DSP intellectual property (IP) blocks can be generated for a low development cost from the Xilinx Coregen tool. This tool infers the DSP48 slices when directed. Other times it is necessary to instantiate these blocks and control them directly for application specific functions.
  
  

• Embedded Designs - Xilinx currently offers three different embedded solutions: the hard IP PowerPC processor in Virtex-4 and Virtex-5 FPGAs, the Microblaze configurable soft core processor, and the Picoblaze 8-bit microcontroller. Verien has direct design experience with all three of these, as well as interfacing to external processors and DSPs, and with bus interface standards such as COM Express.
  
  

• Board-Level Design Services - Verien has provided board-level designs for products ranging from 30 components to 1000 components. Past examples include mixed signal designs with isolated power and ground schemes, gigabit high-speed differential pairs, A/D and D/A converters, power supplies, and with many other design specifics.
  
  

• Turnkey Board Services - In addition to board-level design services, Verien can provide layout, fabrication, component procurement, assembly using partner services, and debug in our lab.
  
  

• Additional services include ASIC to FPGA, and FPGA to FPGA retargetting, custom IP development, and on-site design reviews.