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Altera Customer Testimonial

FLEX 8000 Devices Put Sega’s Virtua Cop on Target

The Altera Solution

Sega creates some of the world’s most innovative entertainment products, including the popular Virtua series of video arcade games, which features high-speed, three-dimensional perspectives. Virtua Cop, Sega’s latest addition to the Virtua series, uses an Altera FLEX 8000 device: the EPF8282. The Sega design team chose the EPF8282 to meet their demanding three-month design cycle. Such short design cycles are common in today’s competitive high-tech entertainment industry.

The EPF8282 Target Sensor

The EPF8282, which functions as a target sensor, resides on a board that is independent from the game’s main video processor. Therefore, other Sega designers can use the same board design for future Virtua games.

In Virtua Cop, one or two players advance through a three-dimensional landscape attempting to rescue hostages from a band of terrorists. Players reload their guns by pointing away from the screen and pulling the trigger. The EPF8282 target sensor determines whether the players are shooting terrorists or reloading their guns when their triggers are pulled.

The Virtua Cop system block diagram shows how the Altera EPF8282 interacts with the other system components. When a player pulls the trigger, a light beam is projected from the CRT/Projector. Sensors mounted in the player’s gun detect the beam. This information is relayed to the EPF8282 target sensor, which calculates where the gun is pointed based on the H-Synch and V-Synch information provided by the H/V Separator. The target information is then passed on to the data controller and the CPU to determine the outcome of the player’s action.

Meeting Critical Design Cycles

Sega’s design engineers originally prototyped the target sensor design using over 30 TTL components and a wire-wrapped board. For the production version, they needed a solution that used minimal board space and would allow them to complete the design of the entire game in three months. For the 2,500-gate target sensor design, the Sega team determined that a programmable logic device would do the job more quickly and cost-effectively than a gate array. After evaluating different FLEX 8000 devices, the chose the EPF8282.

First Experience with MAX+PLUS II and FLEX 8000

Although the Sega engineer who designed the target sensor had never used Altera’s development tools before, the intuitive operation and ease-of-use of MAX+PLUS II allowed him to complete the target sensor design in a single week. The EPF8282 design cycle included design entry, design modification, and verification to ensure that the device’s timing characteristics would meet the overall system requirements. If the Sega team had used a gate array, the target sensor design alone would have taken the 12 weeks allotted to complete the entire game.

First, the designer used the Graphic Editor to enter and connect symbols for the TTL components that were on the prototype’s wire-wrap board. After MAX+PLUS II complied and fit the design into the smallest possible FLEX 8000 device, the designer used the Timing Analyzer to verify the design’s maximum clock speed. Even without using the carry and cascade chains, the FLEX 8000 family’s high-speed interconnect functions allowed the design to run at 24 MHz in the slowest speed grade of the EPF8282, exceeding Sega’s 16 MHz requirement.

The Virtua Cop project was also the design team’s first exposure to SRAM-based programmable logic. FLEX 8000 devices, which use SRAM configuration elements, can be configured for operation via an external data source. This feature, called in-circuit reconfigurability (ICR), allows designers to solder the programmable logic devices directly to the board. They can then modify the design by simply downloading an updated configuration file into the device. The speed and convenience of ICR allowed the Sega engineers to perform multiple design iterations in a matter of days, which would have been impossible if they had used a gate array.

A Simple Solution for Volume Production

The EPF8282 replaced over 30 TTL components, simplifying manufacturing and requiring less board space. Sega’s manufacturing division also noted the ease and convenience of SRAM-based devices. FLEX 8000 devices support ICR, so they can be mounted unprogrammed onto the boards, resulting in a fast and efficient manufacturing flow.

Fast Time-to-Market

Although they had never used Altera devices and development tools, the Sega design team completed the EPF8282 target sensor in just 1 week. They were able to design the whole game in 12 weeks, sending Virtua Cop to market on schedule.