Runtime Environment

Production Targets

The following concerns may arise when releasing your application to 3rd parties who will then go on to use it to generate production grade IP:

• Your application may support many different devices and targets, however only a subset of these may be considered production ready at a given release point.
• When lots of targets are available how do we ensure that the user picks the correct one?

This is certainly an area where Origen has scope for further improvement, but for now the following system works adequately and is being used today in large-scale production applications…

Establish the convention with your user base that when generating IP for production the target must always be selected by providing the maskset number (including the revision).

So for example someone using an application to generate production IP for a device with maskset 1M79X should select the target like this:

origen t 1m79x

This keeps things simple for the end user and removes the need for them to choose a target.

To enable the above feature a map must be added to your config/application.rb file like this:

# config/application.rb
config.production_targets = {
  "0m79x" => "eagle_0",
  "0n30d" => "falcon_0",
  "1n92a" => "osprey_1",
}

Now whenever a maskset number is entered as a target the above table will be referred to automatically to select the actual target file.

If giving the user a choice over the actual target to use is unavoidable, the number of options can be reduced by mapping a given maskset to multiple targets:

# config/application.rb
config.production_targets = {
  "0m79x" => ["eagle_0_func", "eagle_0_bist"],
  "0n30d" => "falcon_0",
  "1n92a" => "osprey_1",
}

Now a user selecting 0M79X will be presented with a message showing the two options and will be asked to choose one of them.

Although not generally recommended, it is also possible to map multiple maskset numbers to the same target:

# config/application.rb
config.production_targets = {
  "0m79x" => ["eagle_0_func", "eagle_0_bist"],
  "0n30d" => "falcon_0",
  "1n30d" => "falcon_0",
  "1n92a" => "osprey_1",
}

Finally if a specific target(s) is not supported for a given release it can be easily disabled by commenting out the relevant line(s):

# config/application.rb
config.production_targets = {
  "0m79x" => ["eagle_0_func", "eagle_0_bist"],
#  "0n30d" => "falcon_0",
#  "1n30d" => "falcon_0",
  "1n92a" => "osprey_1",
}

Now any requests to select target 0N30D or 1N30D will give a not found error.