Plunify's newest FPGA Expansion Pack for Vivado is the latest addition to a suite of cloud-enabled tools on Plunify Cloud. This tool was created for FPGA designers who have explored and are ready or perhaps have already adopted the cloud. They can relate easily to the following account of a typical customer's experience.\u00a0Plunify has been using the Amazon Web Services, Azure and Google Compute Engine clouds since the beginning, so we hope to help designer teams avoid potential pitfalls.<\/p>\n
Mark is a CAD manager at a major telecommunications equipment maker.\u00a0His team recently signed up with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and set up a few build servers in the cloud. The promise is huge in terms of how much the designers can increase their productivity.<\/span><\/p>\n To upper management, this means a shift from capital expenses to operational expenses, reducing on-premise tool license purchases, and less administrative and IT overheads. Most importantly, offloading intensive builds and optimization efforts to the cloud can help them meet release schedules.<\/span><\/p>\n To the designers,\u00a0this means no more worrying about the availability of build machines, tool licenses and even the maintenance of machines that were left idle for some of the time. Sudden demand for more build servers can be fulfilled almost immediately.<\/span><\/p>\n Everything seemed perfect. But after a couple of days, the FPGA designers\u2019 experience with using the cloud directly was much worse than what Mark had expected.<\/span><\/p>\n He summed it up ruefully in one sentence, \u201cEngineers are not IT people.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Starting cloud instances, authenticating access into the machines, maintaining the connection(s), uploading design files, tracking the status of builds, downloading results and cleaning up afterward - all these steps were doable but the FPGA designers found them to be a major hassle. Word got around internally, leading to a steep decline in other teams' interest in the cloud.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The FPGA Expansion Pack, a Vivado plugin dedicated to enabling cloud operations, is our humble answer to Mark\u2019s issues.<\/span><\/p>\n To make the cloud experience part of an FPGA designer\u2019s workflow, the plugin adds buttons directly into the Vivado toolbar.\u00a0This means that any designer can build and debug designs using as many high-performance servers as\u00a0he\/she likes, without even leaving the Vivado GUI.<\/span><\/p>\n\n
Why? \u201cEngineers are not IT people.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/h4>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Enter FPGA Expansion Pack - When There's A Will, There's A Way<\/h2>\n