See the “Design Flows” section of the “Introduction” chapter for the design flow involved in using the Mentor Graphics interface. That chapter also describes the general steps for creating a design using the Mentor interface.
This tutorial describes an incremental design methodology. In incremental design, you process the design, make a small change to the design, and process the design again. You use place and route information from the previous design processing cycle to constrain subsequent cycles of the same design. When you use this method, timing information in a design remains relatively stable through many processing cycles. Also, place and route time is considerably reduced since much of the processing is done in previous cycles.
You can target the tutorial design for an XC4000E or XC9000 device. You can use a Xilinx demonstration board to test the functionality of your design. Make sure your demonstration board and software support your selected device. To determine compatibility, refer to the release notes that came with your software package.
This tutorial uses the following conventions to refer to the various device families:
