What’s New in Xpedition – FPGA-PCB Co-Design

In the last What’s New in Xpedition blog post, we reviewed the new schematic capture features that are available in the Xpedition VX.2 series of releases. We looked at the new symbol editor that has the same look and feel as the schematic editor, along with the new search functionality, the updated project integration user interface, and the enhanced display control functionality. In this blog post, we’ll look under the hood and check out what’s new in the area of FPGA-PCB Co-Design. Xpedition FPGA-PCB Co-Design functionality provides correct-by-construction FPGA I/O assignment, allowing pin swapping and layout-based I/O optimization within the PCB process. It eliminates the barriers between the FPGA and PCB design teams, enabling concurrent design processes with greater accuracy and speed.

With the VX.2 series of releases, the FPGA Wizard has been enhanced to utilize a simplified GUI with a reduced number of visible steps, and as such, is less intimidating to new users. There are also less steps from FPGA unravel to the schematic, through improved quality and performance, improved messaging, and the ability to forward annotate all optimized FPGA devices.

The VX.2 series also delivers innovative FGPA-PCB Co-Design functionality that provides for:

• Multi-gigabit transceiver signal group optimization that supports the unraveling and swapping of blocks and channels.
• Enhanced back annotation from the FPGA I/O optimizer, to automate synchronization steps and maintain schematic integrity. This includes the propagation of FPGA signal names, along with automatic management of net name and net stub changes.
• A new option to place FPGA symbols during schematic capture that efficiently places all symbols associated with an FPGA in sequence.

If you would like a preview of what’s new, please feel free to check out the What’s New in Xpedition video, along with online demos of the highlights for each of the VX.2 releases. You can also take a quick tour of Xpedition Enterprise to get a great overview of all the functionality that Xpedition has to offer.

Be sure to check back for the next entry in this series – What’s New in Xpedition – Layout.