Escalade plots new graphical EDA approach

Electronic News, Feb 6, 1995 by Jeff Dorsch

DesignBook initially supports the Xilinx XC4000 line of FPGAs, and will support other products in the future. "This is not an FPGA-only tool," said mark Miller, Escalado's VP of marketing. DesignBook has been architected to support CPLDs, ASICs and structured custom devices, as well as FPGAs.

"Increasing design complexity and shrinking project cycles make HLDA an imperative," said Curt Wozniak, president and COO of Xilinx. Escalade tools show great promise in addressing this need."

Added Hans Schwarz, Xilinx' director of software marketing: "Our customers are demanding HLDA tools that are easy to use while offering the most advanced technology. Escalade support for Xilinx tools gives our customers one of the most productive HLDA environments for programmable logic."

DesignBook has individual, graphically-oriented editors. StateMachine Designer is for designing control logic; Block Designer for parameterized block diagrams for data path; Equation Designer for Boolean equations; and VHDL Designer for VHDL entry. Other elements are the TestBench Designer, for intuitive stimulus and timing waveform editing, and Constraint Designer, for managing implementation constraints.

"Command and control" modules for various synthesis and simulation point tools are known as Commanders. The software is initially available with Commanders for Exemplar Logic's FPGA/CPLD synthesis software and for Model Technology's V-System VHDL simulator. Verilog HDL simulation and Synopsys synthesis Commanders will be released in June and other Commanders based on market demand.

The DesignBook suite was developed on Windows NT, written in C , he noted. The product was then transferred to Windows 3.1 for sale and is being ported to Unix.