This presentation looks at Top-Down System Design targeted to a rapid prototyping system developed for the Canadian Microelectronics Corporation (CMC). The main feature of this development process is the very high-level, tool suite System Design Station (SDS) from Mentor Graphics. This tool suite allows the designer to combine both visually oriented top down designs with a fully integrated virtual prototyping system. The virtual prototyping encourages high level verification of a design as well as presentation of the design to non-technical members of a specification team.

The design flow promotes another feature of the Mentor high-level tools, portability. The HDL synthesis is performed using Synopsys, targeting rapid implementation using Xilinx FPGAs.

The final target is the CMC Rapid Prototyping Board, which combines the necessary elements for verification at hardware speeds. This verification can complement the virtual verification process initiated in the SDS design cycle through a user interface. Alternatively the board may be configured to act as a test bench to exhaustively test the design.

Bio:
C. Hart Poskar is currently studying towards a Ph.D. in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Manitoba. His current research interests are in systems design, particularly parallel paradigms of software and hardware. Dr. Bob McLeod is a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Manitoba and an Affiliate Professor with TRLabs also in Winnipeg. He is also a member of the board of directors of the Canadian Microelectronics Corporation. Atul Jain is currently working as an ASIC Design Engineer with Texas Instruments, Inc. Has a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and is interested in the following areas: High-level VLSI design (Binary and Multiple-Valued Logic), Hardware/Software Co-design, development of design flows. In past, has worked with Canadian Microelectronics Corporation and Central Research Lab, Hitachi Ltd. Richard Wieler is presently employed as a Computer Engineer at the Canadian Microelectronics Corporation. He received his BSc in 1992 and his MSc. in 1995, both from the University of Manitoba. Currently he is working on the design and integration of rapid prototyping environments and the application of Field Programmable Devices to circuit verification.