Rapid prototyping tools for FPGA designs: RapidSmith

Designer productivity for FPGA design is significantly limited by the time-consuming nature of the FPGA compilation process (synthesis, map, placement, and routing). However, experimentation on alternative CAD tools for this purpose for Xilinx devices has been somewhat limited. This paper describes the development and distribution of RapidSmith, a software library to facilitate the manipulation of XDL designs and upon which a complete CAD system can be based. The demonstration portion of this paper will show prototypes of representative CAD tools which can be easily built on top of the RapidSmith system.