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Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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8 years ago

MAX V Support Life

Hi,

I am planning to switch my design to MAX 5 as the current part that I am using (MAX3000A) has EOL-ed.

Is MAX 5 recommended for new design? Will it EOL in the next 5 to 10 years?

If MAX 5 is not recommended, what is the recommended alternative closest to MAX3000A?

Also, I have some technical questions.

1) When I synthesize my design with MAX3000A using Quartus II version 7.2 SP2, the total Macrocells used is 56.

However, when I synthesize the same design with MAX 5 (5M80ZE64C5N), the total LE used is 117 (greater than the capacity of this part).

5M80ZE64C5N is supposed to contains equivalent of 64 Macrocells, so I am surprise that this part cannot fit the original design.

I look at the .map.rpt file for both the synthesis, and saw something not quite right.

Under the section “Analysis & Synthesis Resource Utilization by Entity”, the resources used by “Frame_signals:inst14”, MAX3000A uses 6 Macrocells, but MAX5 uses 57 logic elements.

This “Frame_signals:inst14” is actually a State machine: "|xxxxx|Frame_signals:inst14|statem" contains 32 states and 6 state bits.

Does MAX3000A and MAX 5 handles state machines differently? Do I need to modify the way I coded the state machines?

Please help. Thanks.

1 Reply

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
    Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
    8 years ago

    A different macro cell utilization is expectable due to the different architecture. MAX V 4-input-LUT is less effective if a logic term has many inputs.

    We need to look at the code to determine if it might be optimized, e.g. by changing the state variable coding. Using a high level description according to Altera state machine templates should generally give good results.