It’s been a busy few days here in Canyon Lake, and we’re ready to share exciting news in advance of #53DAC coming up on Monday, June 6[SUP]th[/SUP]. S2C is offering a technical program tutorial on “Overcoming the Challenges of FPGA Prototyping” followed by the launch of our latest book project, “PROTOTYPICAL”, including a field… Read More
FPGA based Prototyping
Software-Driven Verification Drives Tight Links between Emulation and Prototyping
I’ve mentioned many times what has become a very common theme in SoC and system verification – it has to be driven by the software because any concept of exhaustively verifying “everything” is neither feasible nor meaningful. Emulation has become a critical component of this flow in validating and regressing… Read More
Solving the Next Big SoC Challenges with FPGA Prototyping
The health of the semiconductor industry revolves around the “start”. Chip design starts translate to wafer starts, and both support customer design wins and product shipments. Roadmaps develop for expanding product offerings, and capital expenditures flow in to add capacity enabling more chip designs and wafer starts. If… Read More
Aldec reprograms HES7 for AXI4 speed
FPGA-based prototyping firms are all grappling with the problem of higher speed connectivity between a development host and their hardware. Aldec is announcing their solution at DVCon 2016, turning to an AMBA AXI4 interface bridged into a host with PCIe x8.
Faster host interfaces deliver dual benefits in FPGA-based prototyping.… Read More
S2C opens up FPGA prototyping for PCIe fabrics
Reconfigurable computing began with FPGA cards dropped into expansion slots in workstations. FPGA-based prototyping vendors tended away from that model as interconnect speeds rose and cabling complexity between modules increased. Much faster PCIe interfacing and bigger FPGAs mean revisiting the concept.… Read More
Fastest SoC time-to-success: emulators, or FPGA-based prototypes?
Hardware emulators and FPGA-based prototyping systems are descendants of the same ancestor. The Quickturn Systems Rapid Prototype Machine (RPM) introduced in May 1988 brought an array of Xilinx XC3090 FPGAs to emulate designs with hundreds of thousands of gates. From there, hardware emulators and FPGA-based prototyping … Read More
Should there be a 5-second IoT chip rule?
Kids have a tendency to put things in their mouths. Any parent can relate to the statement, “Put that down! You don’t know where it’s been!” After the first child, concern usually relaxes quite a bit. People joke about a 5-second rule on the premise if an object was just dropped on the floor, it may not be contaminated yet.… Read More
Breaking the Limits of SoC Prototyping
Earlier this month during my conversation with Dr. Walden C. Rhines, he emphasised the need for our next generation designers to think at system level and design everything keeping the system’s view in mind. The verification will go through major transformation at the system level. I can see the FPGA prototyping systems already… Read More
A (R)evolution in Hardware-based Simulation Acceleration
The most exciting products in our industry are those that are both evolutionary and revolutionary. Cadence has just announced an update to their hardware simulation acceleration platform – Palladium Z1 – which continues the evolution of the unique capabilities of processor-based acceleration, plus a revolutionary approach… Read More
Pushing on AXI-connected IP in FPGAs
Success stories are great. Reading how someone uses a product contributes much more insight than reading about a product. Last month we had a teaser for a presentation by Wave Semiconductor; this month, we have the slides showing how they are using FPGA-based prototyping, AXI transactions, and DPI to speed up development.
First,… Read More
Rethinking Multipatterning for 2nm Node