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Take the Titanium Solution
Xilinx Titanium Technical Service engineers coach clients through design issues.
by Vikram Pasham
Design Engineer, Xilinx Design Services
Xilinx, Inc.
vikram.pasham@xilinx.com
Need to enhance your design productivity?
Decrease your design costs? Accelerate time
to market? With the complexities and possibilities
of today’s designs, it’s easy to get
sidetracked from your main goals.
Xilinx Titanium Technical Service provides
on-site or off-site support for clients
on a contract basis. Titanium application
engineers are adept at ensuring that you
start and finish your designs the right way.
Our engineers provide design methodology
coaching to make sure you take the most
efficient approach. And our engineers’ skill
at tracing debug issues back to the design is
one of our most powerful services. Here’s
an example from one of our clients.
Customer Challenges
During the development of a high-definition
television (HDTV) video application, the
engineering team of our client company
(which prefers to remain anonymous for
competitive reasons) had developed proprietary
DSP algorithms for uniform video
correction. These were implemented on a
custom ASIC developed by a third party,
which had several silicon bugs.
Fearing that the bugs would cost them
the chance to be first to market with their
technology, the engineers ported part of the
ASIC’s functionality to a Xilinx FPGA. Yet
they still noticed that prototypes, when
tested in the lab, had power-up and image
distortion issues. Thus, they decided to
bring in a dedicated Xilinx Titanium
Technical Service application engineer.
At the time, the customer’s main
challenges were:
• A densely packed design using
99% slices, 70% block RAMs,
and multipliers in a Virtex-II
device. They wanted to add additional
features into the FPGA, but did not
have the budget to use a larger one.
• They couldn’t meet timing in their
Virtex-II –4 speed grade part and were
using –5 speed grade. This increased
their bill of materials.
• This design had to support six different
pin configurations for different RGB
connectors on different boards.
• The prototypes were behaving
inconsistently on power-up and
exhibiting image distortion.
The Titanium Solution
Over the course of one week, a Xilinx
Titanium engineer gave the client’s engineering
team a crash course on FPGA
design techniques and constraints. He suggested
replacing the existing design’s clocking
structure with Virtex-II digital clock
managers (DCMs) for multiple clock generations.
After learning about the features of
DCMs, the engineering team discovered
they could use DCM status bits to determine
if the digital video interface (DVI)
clock was disconnected. Based on this discovery,
the team designed a robust recovery
mechanism. This solved the power-up and
image distortion problems.
The existing design was already using all
of the resources of the FPGA, yet there were
further requirements to add functionality.
The Titanium engineer identified portions
of the design that weren’t suited for FPGA
architecture. He recommended other changes
for optimal efficiency, while still preserving
design functionality. Knowing that Virtex-II
silicon can easily meet 60 MHz DVI clock
rates, he suggested using tight packing
options in map tools, and using the multipass
place-and-route and floorplanning features
in Xilinx ISE tools. This freed up enough
resources for the engineers to add the additional
features in the FPGA.
To meet timing in the Virtex-II –4 speed
grade part for the six different pin configurations,
the Titanium engineer placed timing
constraints to cover all the clocks, cross clock
domain paths, and multicycle paths.
Together, they put together working prototypes
in the lab supporting the six different
pin configurations.
After these adjustments to the design,
the company is now able to use a lowerspeed
grade part, reducing their system cost.
They are on schedule to meet their time-tomarket
goals.
Conclusion
A Titanium Technical Service application
engineer can work at Xilinx, on-site, or a
mix of both. This flexibility allows the
engineers to fully understand the needs and
requirements of our clients, as well as leverage
Xilinx factory resources to resolve problems
and accelerate production.
For more information about Titanium
Technical Services, please call 800-888-
FPGA (3742) or visit http://support.
xilinx.com/support/services/titanium.htm.
Fall 2003 Xcell Journal 71