Xilinx buys software tool firm to accelerate FPGA-based designs

Xilinx buys software tool firm to accelerate FPGA-based designs
By Semiconductor Business News
November 2, 2000 (12:51 p.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20001102S0022

SAN JOSE -- Xilinx Inc. here today announced it has purchased Visual Software Solutions Inc. of Plantation, Fla., to reduce the time it takes to implement designs using multimillion-gate field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs).

Xilinx said Visual Software's expertise will allow it to deliver a variety of customized tools for HDL-based design using Xilinx's Virtex-II FPGAs. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, and the transaction is not expected to have a material effect on Xilinx financial results.

"The integration of HDL Bencher and StateCAD into the Xilinx software family extends our offering of multimillion gate design solutions," said Rich Sevcik, vice president and general manager of the IP [intellectual property], Services, and Software group at Xilinx. "By taking this technology in-house we will be able to focus the energy of this talented design team in delivering even faster time to market for our customers."

Xilinx said it has hired the principals of Visual Software Solutions to be responsible for development of the technology and use with the Virtex-II FPGAs. Xilinx said Visual Software Solutions' HDL Bencher streamlines the hardware description language (HDL) verification process for multimillion-gate FPGAs. For designers, no knowledge of HDL scripting is needed, according to the San Jose programmable logic supplier. StateCAD automates state machine development in VHDL, Verilog, and Abel languages, said Xilinx.

"The acquisition of VSS, and its StateCAD and HDL Bencher products, is the natural conclusion of a process that started when Xilinx began shipping these products as part of the EDA Allstart program," said Rodrigo Escoto, president of Visual Software Solutions.