Mentor announces synthesis support for Altera Cyclone III FPGAs

Mentor Graphics Corporation announced that its suite of advanced synthesis products supports the newly introduced Cyclone III field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) from Altera Corporation. Both companies have been in close cooperation to ensure Precision Synthesis support for the full range of Cyclone III devices. Beta support for the new family is currently available in Precision Synthesis.

Simon Bloch, general manager, Mentor Graphics Design Creation and Synthesis Division, said, "With the Cyclone III family’s combination of power and functionality, designers of cost-sensitive high-volume applications will require a robust synthesis tool to maximize every drop of performance and logic density. Customers wanting to take full advantage of the value of Cyclone III FPGAs will need Precision Synthesis."

Precision Synthesis forms the centerpiece of the Mentor Graphics FPGA flow with support for design creation, verification and printed circuit board (PCB) integration—the vendor-independent solution for FPGA design. With advanced support for ASIC prototyping (support for DesignWare libraries, Synopsys design constraints (SDC), gated-clock handling, etc.), plus advanced implementation and optimization techniques, such as automatic mapping and inferencing of dedicated digital signal procession (DSP) and random-access memory (RAM) blocks, Precision Synthesis is suited to handle today’s high-end FPGAs. In addition, Precision Synthesis features a design analysis capability, allowing designers to cross-probe between multiple views as well as perform interactive static timing for rapid ‘what-if’ analyses. Precision Synthesis reduces design iterations, and enables faster, more predictable completion of designs, while delivering high quality of results (QoR).

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