Poland moves into technology

With its recent transition from the Soviet Block to the European Union, Poland now has the opportunity to make its mark on the world. President Lech Kaczynski has promised government support for high-tech companies and a more commercially favorable administration. One area in which the country can raise its position in the semiconductor hierarchy is programmable logic. With FPGAs' gate density increasing, operating speeds increasing, and voltages decreasing, signal integrity becomes a serious concern. Debugging tools that FPGA vendors supply and proprietary software packages are no longer enough. Aldec-ADT (Katowice, Poland) manufactures software for enhanced verification. Its Active-HDL integrated environment for designs in VHDL and SystemC uncovers glitches and pinpoints sections of code that these glitches relate to, allowing the rapid performance of alterations.

Another Polish company, Microtech, got its start in the early 1990s, aiming to develop hardware and software for signal-processing systems in radar. The highly reliable products it now produces match military/aerospace requirements. Resistance to harsh conditions, strong processing power, automatic testing and fault diagnosis, and advanced programming techniques bring benefits to such designs. The products use IP (intellectual-property) core technology to link hardware, algorithms, and software within FPGAs, resulting in faster, more flexible systems. A portfolio of demo boards based on Spartan II devices gives designers a platform on which to perform ASIC prototyping and test implementation.

Evatronix (Gliwice, Poland), which is a spin-off of the Silesian University of Technology, specializes in soft cores that enable engineers to cut time to market for SOC (system-on-chip) designs. The company supplies the cores with VHDL or Verilog-HDL source code or as postsynthesis netlists. Firm versions of cores for both Altera and Xilinx devices are available, allowing quicker turnaround times.

Aldec-ADT, www.aldec.com/pl.

Microtech, www.microtech.com.pl.

Evatronix, www.evatronix.pl.