Good Field Programmable Gate Array design calls for a unique design style to take advantage of the architecture. That's too bad, because most engineers will use the same design style they've always used. Don't blame your engineer though, that's the way he's been trained to think for the last three decades. See, an FPGA constrains a design in ways most designers have never seen before.
The FPGA structure limits the wiring between logic cells to a small number of lines, where other technologies have few such constraints. The wiring in an FPGA is also unique in that it adds large delays to the logic. An FPGA's high flip-flop to logic ratio puts FPGA design in a class by itself too, since it favors using registers over other logic. Even the cell architecture demands an unusual design style, and that style varies between the different FPGAs. This means that FPGA designs done using traditional styles won't perform well.
The Andraka Consulting Group understands FPGAs and the design styles needed to make these devices perform at their best. An extensive background in high speed pipelined signal processors and unmatched experience with FPGAs gets you the performance you want.
Andraka Consulting Group, Inc. uses. Viewlogic design and simulation tools. Most work is done in our facilities on our equipment.
A client was using two Xilinx XC4020E FPGA’s and external memory to compute vector magnitude. By using an alternate design approach, Andraka Consulting Group, Inc. showed the customer how to obtain the same result with less than half of one XC4020E while gaining almost four times the performance. The real-estate savings helped to eliminate a whole board from the system.
A terminal manufacturer presented us with a CRT display controller implemented in a Xilinx XC3020 FPGA. He had stripped the design of most of its bells and whistles to make it fit, and still had timing problems. By redesigning the controller using our proven design philosophy, we were able to restore all of the extra features and had a circuit capable of working at over twice the design clock rate. Our design was so successful, that the client had us adapt it for a Liquid Crystal Display controller
Andraka Consulting Group successfully developed a video concentrator in an Atmel AT6010 (a 10,000 gate array). The finished 80 MHz design utilizes over 85% of the chip and is among the most complex designs (25,000 gates) ever attempted in an Atmel FPGA. Engineers familiar with Atmel FPGAs and tools called this design impossible because of the density and speed required.