Experimental Comparison of Synthesis Tools Altera Quartus II and Synthagate

Abstract

The paper presents comparison between efficiency of an industrial FPGA design software tool Altera Quartus II and similar design software tool Synthagate by Syntezza company of an academic origin. The experiments were performed using a series of examples describing the Mealy finite state machines; one hot state encoding was used in all cases. Area (number of used logical blocks) was the main parameter used for the comparison. Influence of the way of FSM description (in VHDL language) on the quality of synthesis was studied. The obtained results show that Synthagate in almost all cases performs synthesis more efficiently and essentially quicker than Altera Quartus. Section I presents motivation of the research. Section II reminds the notion of FSM. Section III describes problems which had to be solved to provide correctness of experimental comparison. Section IV presents some details about state encoding way used in the experiments. In Section V, the experimental results are presented. Section VI describes the problems related to the comparison which still have to be solved. Section VII presents the conclusions from the experiments. Section VIII suggests possible reasons of the detected situation.