Products have to be designed for flexibility to cover different requirements with preferably one hardware base concept. FPGAs which are designed in such a base concept provide the required flexibility. Hitex has focused on the design-in of Altera FPGAs and is very much experienced in the design flow (simulation, synthesis and place&route) using professional tools such as Mentor Graphics LeonardoSpectrum and ModelSim, Altera Quartus. Of course, FPGAs from other vendors can also be integrated.
Simulation of an FPGA design is one part of the business - to have the real FPGA design running in a hardware environment without development of an own prototyping board is the other.
With Tanto3 Hitex has designed a generic platform with a large FPGA extension board which can be used for rapid FPGA prototyping. Of course, Tanto3 could also be applied in fields of testing, signal- and bus analysis, debugging, programming and FPGA prototyping.
Tanto3 Test and Measurement Board can be plugged onto Tanto3 and provides easy access to the set of application I/Os. The Test and Measurement Board contains a separate FPGA, which can embed a complete verification environment, including stimuli generator and response analyzer. It also provides an easy access interface using standard pin-headers to connect test equipment (e.g. Oscilloscopes, Logic Analyzer) to manually verify the application‘s I/O signals.
Hitex offers to implement FPGA designs based on pure source code (Verilog, VHDL) using predefined modules like standard LPMs or even complex IP modules like DDR SDRAM controller.
In close cooperation with our customer, Hitex creates the specification as follows: