Xilinx Titanium Technical Service engineers coach clients through design issues.

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 gen-erations. 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 lower-speed grade part, reducing their system cost. They are on schedule to meet their time-to-market 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.

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