IP Development

Introduction

ITDev can design custom IP (Intellectual Property) blocks in the widely used hardware description languages VHDL and Verilog. This may be to implement a complex algorithm, accelerate an existing software solution, communicate with a proprietary interface, or to develop other proprietary intellectual property.

Custom IP Blocks

Some examples of custom IP that we have created for our customers:

• RLDRAM2 Controller - Highly optimised for a specific application.
• Complex Algorithms - For example, video encoding blocks.
• Hardware Interface BIST Controller - Built-In-Self-Test blocks for a wide variety of interfaces.

Third-Party IP

ITDev is experienced at making effective use of third-party IP blocks in our designs. We will actively seek to minimise costs and time to market by buying-in and integrating standard design components where appropriate.

The following are examples of third-party IP we have integrated into our designs:

• Memory Controllers - e.g. DDR2
• High Speed Interfaces - e.g. LVDS
• Softcore Processors - e.g. Xilinx MicroBlaze

Optimisations

ITDev is familiar with a wide range of optimisation requirements, which vary from project to project. For some projects, a balanced compromise is the best approach, but there are times when designs should driven by the specific needs of the target hardware, system, or even project plan.

Some possible optimisation priorities are illustrated as follows:

• Low Power - Minimise toggling of nets, clock frequencies and amount of logic.
• High Speed - Plan effective pipelining and parallel processing.
• Minimum Area / FPGA Resource - Share resources, consider moving high speed processing to another clock domain to avoid over constraining the bulk of the logic.
• Maintainability - Sacrifice some other optimisations where implementing them would be unnecessarily complex.
• Low Noise - Careful floorplanning, asynchronous interfaces if appropriate, schedule quiet periods if sensitivity is greater at known times.