Altera FPGA Design Services

Verien Design Group provides Altera FPGA design services, as well as analog and board-level designs for a wide variety of markets. Verien's founder, Dave Matthews, first started designing Altera MAX7000 series CPLDs in the 90's, followed by the FLEX10K series FPGAs, and now designs with the latest Cyclone FPGAs. Verien engineer Ben Klass served as a support engineer for Altera prior to joining Verien.

Over the years, we have seen a steady migration from masked ASICs to FPGAs, as FPGAs increased in density and decreased proportionally in cost. The FPGAs of today are very different from the "glue-logic" FPGAs of yesterday; entire systems can be integrated in a single FPGA. Whereas we used to design the glue logic that binded the system together, today we are designing the whole system in the FPGA. Our typical FPGAs today include some amount of DSP logic, sometimes an embedded processor, memory interfaces, and high-speed links for communications.

The following sections describe some aspects of our Altera design services:

• High Performance Designs - With direct design experience at clock rates of 100, 133, 160 and 200 MHz, we know how to achieve timing closure for your design. See our high performance design notes for tips on how we achieve this.
  
  

• Communications and Networking Designs - Verien has direct design experience with the PCI Express and proprietary communications links at rates of 500 Mbits/sec to 2.5 Mbits/sec. Other lower speed applications have been implemented with LVDS signaling. Additionally, Verien has experience in lower speed communications such as Controller Area Network (CAN), I²C, as well as high performance VoIP processing solutions. Verien also designed the board-level physical interfaces for most of these products.
  
  

• Cost Sensitive Designs - We've designed cost-sensitive consumer level products, products that have shipped over 100,000 units, and products that have shipped in the 100's. There are applications where pennies count, and applications where a higher cost allocated for future expansion in the FPGA fabric is prudent. For Altera designs, unless one needs the performance or a specific feature of the higher cost Stratix family FPGAs, one is best off to use the low cost Cyclone family.
  
  

• DSP Designs - Verien has designed many image processing systems including digital and infrared cameras, CAT scan and ultrasound processing chips, and other DSP-oriented applications. DSP designs can be either Matlab/Simulink with DSP Builder or HDL based methodologies. Often, DSP intellectual property (IP) blocks are provided as Altera Megacores, however most DSP applications require some amount of custom logic, as well.
  
  

• Embedded Designs - Altera currently offers three different embedded solutions, all in soft IP form: the NIOS processor, a soft version of the ARM Cortex M1, and a version of the 8-bit Coldfire from Freescale. Verien has completed multiple embedded FPGA designs at this point and can deliver a working embedded design with your requirements. In addition, Verien has experience interfacing to external processors and DSPs, and with bus interface standards such as COM Express.
  
  

• Board-Level Design Services - Verien has provided board-level designs for products ranging from 30 components to 1000 components. Past examples include mixed signal designs with isolated power and ground schemes, gigabit high-speed differential pairs, A/D and D/A converters, power supplies, and with many other design specifics.
  
  

• Turnkey Board Services - In addition to board-level design services, Verien can provide layout, fabrication, component procurement, assembly using partner services, and debug in our lab.
  
  

• Additional services include ASIC to FPGA, and FPGA to FPGA retargetting, custom IP development, and on-site design reviews.