Why Hire Dillon Engineering?
Count on Dillon Engineering for all your FPGA and ASIC design services and consulting needs.
We address some questions you may have before embarking on your design.
Why hire a design services firm when there are so many IP cores out there that can do the job, many of them royalty-free?
Why hire a design services firm when there are electonic system-level (ESL) design tools that can take our design to FPGA or ASIC directly from a high-level language description?
Why hire a design services firm when we have a logic design team in-house?
I found a 3rd-party IP core for purchase that appears will meet my current needs. Why would I hire Dillon Engineering to custom-develop the IP instead?
I know my 3rd-party IP core has been intensively tested and verified by the vendor and its customers. How do I know Dillon Engineering custom-developed IP will have equivalent quality?
We address some questions you may have before embarking on your design.
Why hire a design services firm when there are so many IP cores out there that can do the job, many of them royalty-free?
- The short answer is that FPGA or ASIC designs are systems of smaller building blocks, and the key is in the design, understanding and integration of these blocks. It is unlikely that an entire system's needs can be satisfied by one IP core, or even in a collection of cores that seamlessly work together. Rather, top-down designs will require meticulous analysis for a suitable bottom-up implementation using IP cores. (More detailed discussion is in our article on top-down/bottom-up design.) For IP requirements that cannot be found elsewhere, we offer standard and custom IP development for portable designs from FPGA to ASIC.
Why hire a design services firm when there are electonic system-level (ESL) design tools that can take our design to FPGA or ASIC directly from a high-level language description?
- We believe that successful designs are the coming together of the right people using the best tools appropriate for the application. Shortcomings in any of these areas will add risk to your development. At DE, we have used and constantly evaluate emerging ESL technologies, we consistently integrate with customer design flows based on a variety of high-level toolsets, and we have even developed our own higher-level tools (see our ParaCore Architect page). However, we feel a tool itself cannot be the only answer to achieving increased productivity or desired performance for all applications. As with any technological progression, someday most logic design will be done at a higher level of abstraction than Verilog or VHDL RTL, but for now RTL is the right fit for custom logic design, with tools like ParaCore Architect increasing productivity where it makes sense.
Why hire a design services firm when we have a logic design team in-house?
- Depending on your in-house design capabilities, we can be an extension to your team in any capacity you require. If you are light in general design capability, count on us to drive the architecture and take the design through to hardware. If you are strong in FPGA design, use us for intensive math function implementation, modeling, and verification. If you need general 3rd-party input to ensure a design starts and stays on track, our expertise is available to you on a consulting basis.
- It is unlikely you will find a better fit for designs surrounding our core competency of DSP design, especially anything with FFT/IFFT. Beyond that, we deeply understand the design challenges of different Applications, we are comfortable within the frameworks of different industry Markets, and we have seen where and why projects go sour and how to avoid it. In general, we have a global perspective beyond logic gates, and this translates to no surprises and high customer satisfaction during our engagements. For recent Dillon Engineering success stories, browse through our news items.
I found a 3rd-party IP core for purchase that appears will meet my current needs. Why would I hire Dillon Engineering to custom-develop the IP instead?
- When evaluating any IP, there are the obvious factors such as quality, size, performance, cost and schedule to consider, along with some larger issues. Will the IP need to scale multiple products or applications, FPGA and/or ASIC? What level of programmability is required? How much work will it take to integrate the IP into the system? IP that is inflexible, poorly documented, minimally maintained, or targeted to older technology may very well prove to be much less of a bargain in the long run.
I know my 3rd-party IP core has been intensively tested and verified by the vendor and its customers. How do I know Dillon Engineering custom-developed IP will have equivalent quality?
- The foundation of our auto-generated IP are building blocks that have been developed and perfected over many years. With our rigorous modeling environment, any IP we develop has an equivalent bit-accurate model representation that is verified in simulation. Robust data generation from our modeling environment will include myriad typical and worst-case data, along with any custom data sets required. The combination of all these means any IP core we provide will have been meticulously modeled, designed and verified per your requirements.