The CoreFire Next Design Suite is a dataflow-based development system that brings new levels of ease and speed to FPGA programming on Annapolis Micro Systems, Inc. high-performance motherboards, I/O cards, and mezzanine cards.
The CoreFire Next environment supplies user-made connections between ready-made programming modules, or cores, and manages multiple domain requirements automatically. CoreFire Next eliminates the need for hardware design languages: the user simply creates dataflow diagrams by dragging and dropping cores, or building blocks, from the libraries, and connecting their ports. Cores automatically work together to handle synchronization, manage clocks and other low level hardware signals, and guarantee correct control by design. CoreFire Next allows standard data types and supports data type propagation, where modifying a data type will automatically propagate through the rest of the CoreFire Next design. As a result, CoreFire Next allows the user to program and debug complex FPGA designs at a high level of proficiency.
CoreFire Next’s drag-and-drop method of building designs allows for ease of use, which helps make the tool easy to learn. CoreFire Next presents the user with a simple way of visualizing designs, rather than extensive and confusing code. Because of this, the user does not have to be a skilled or experienced digital hardware designer. Designers of many different disciplines can use CoreFire Next to create applications.
The CoreFire Next Design Suite allows users to incorporate proprietary source code, such as VHDL, into CoreFire Next designs through the EDIF (Electronic Design Interchange Format). This can be useful in cases where users have "golden source" code.
CoreFire Next mitigates schedule risk by offering design reliability, whereas conventional designs can be inconsistent and undependable. CoreFire Next tools and modules are extensively optimized, tested, and validated before a release is completed. This ensures that the user can concentrate on solving the problem at hand. CoreFire Next works with Annapolis Micro Systems, Inc. COTS boards, which saves user’s valuable engineering time and development dollars. Training classes, as well as application support, are available to CoreFire Next customers.
CoreFire Next provides a straight forward and time efficient method of migrating current and future generation FPGA designs. To complete a design flow conversion, simply reimport the original diagram, make minor adjustments to compensate for architectural changes, and recompile the design. CoreFire Next will rebuild the design to allow for the desired support. Switching designs from one mainboard family to another, using CoreFire Next, can be done quickly and with ease. Alternative methods of design migration, VHDL and Verilog, are time consuming and complicated.
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