[March 24, 2006] Xilinx Launches ESL Initiative Tweet (Electronic News Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)Aimed at making electronic system level (ESL) design methodologies and tools more accessible to system designers, San Jose-based programmable logic supplier Xilinx Inc. today launched its ESL Initiative program. The initiative expands collaboration across the ESL supply chain to better integrate and optimize ESL tool flows for both hardware designers and software programmers targeting Xilinx FPGAs, the company said. While it is the first FPGA supplier to announce its intention in this area, both Xilinx and its rival Altera Inc. share many of the samepartners, including Bluespec, Celoxica, CriticalBlue, Impulse Accelerated Technologies, Mitrionics, Nallatech, Poseidon Design Systems, SystemCrafter and Teja Technologies, that Xilinx reported today. "Ensuring that all designers can readily access the benefits of programmability is fundamental to our vision for the industry, and ESL is an important convergence point for addressing the methodology and tool requirements of both hardware designers and software developers," said Wim Roelandts, president and CEO of Xilinx, in a statement. "We are impressed with the success that our ESL partners have had to date, and are committed to furthering their efforts in a way that expands the reach of ESL solutions and FPGAs to new applications and to users who have never before implemented designs in programmable logic." ESL is an emerging design methodology that allows designers to work at higher levels of abstraction than typically supported by register transfer level (RTL) and gate level hardware descriptions. Its growth has been driven by the continuing complexity of IC design, including the use of third-party intellectual property (IP) blocks and embedded cores, which has made RTL and gate-level methods less efficient. The proliferation of FPGA-based ESL tools and methodologies will make it easier for designers to leverage programmable devices for critical system applications such as algorithm acceleration, high performance computing, high-speed packet processing, and rapid prototyping. Xilinx'sESL Initiative has identified four key areas of focus that include improving ease of use associated with FPGA design; optimizing support for Xilinx embedded PowerPC and MicroBlaze processor solutions; improving high level language synthesis tools; and establishing common standards for FPGA ESL tool interoperability. "The value of the current generation of ESL tools is particularly appealing for our system level designers, so they can evaluate their algorithmic expressions in hardware without needing to become hardware design experts," said Sven Englund, principal engineer at DRS Power and Control Technologies, in the statement. "The ease-of-use concepts that are being pioneered by Xilinx and participants in the ESL Initiative can simplify hardware design to the extent that the details of hardware implementation in an FPGA could soon become transparent to system architects." [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]