Verification of portable intellectual property blocks for FPGAs

In the world of digital electronics, the use of intellectual property (IP) is becoming increasingly more popular in the design of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). Reuse of IP cuts down on the time-to-market for a product and the overall cost for producing that product. Verified IP blocks can also serve as examples, which speed up the learning curve for a beginning engineer because a learn-by-example format is generally easier to comprehend. This paper presents several methods for synthesizing a design, and then places and routes the design with several commercially available tool suites and in the process to presents scripting methods for automating the process.