FPGA prototyping is very popular in modeling hardware for early system prove-out, early embedded software development, as a cost-effective and performance-effective platform for software-driven hardware debug and for late-stage software debug, all before silicon is available. It has significant advantages in run-time… Read More
Free PDF Version of PROTOTYPICAL for SoC Design
In our quest to further enlighten the masses SemiWiki has published four books, we have two more eBooks in post production due out in Q1 2018 and two more topics in research. All of the books are available free for PDF versions or you can get printed versions on Amazon.com or free printed versions at book signings or if you happen to meet… Read More
A Delicate Choice – Emulation versus Prototyping
Hardware-assisted verification has been with us (commercially) for around 20 years and at this point is clearly mainstream. But during this evolution it split into at least two forms (emulation and prototyping), robbing us of a simple choice – to hardware-assist or not to hardware-assist (that is the question). Which in turn … Read More
Prototype-Based Debug for Cloud Design
Unless you’ve been in hibernation for a while, you probably know that a lot more chip design is happening in system companies these days. This isn’t just for science experiments; many of these designs are already being used in high-value applications. This development is captive – systems companies generally don’t want… Read More
CEO Interview: Toshio Nakama of S2C
I haven’t sat down to speak with S2C since we collaborated on the book, PROTOTYPICAL, published just before DAC 2016 and even then, I hadn’t spoken to Toshio Nakama, their CEO. Toshio splits his time between the San Jose headquarters and the Shanghai headquarters so getting time to meet face-to-face has been challenging. I was finally… Read More
A Brief History of FPGA Prototyping
Verifying chip designs has always suffered from a two-pronged problem. The first problem is that actually building silicon is too expensive and too slow to use as a verification tool (when it happens, it is not a good thing and is called a “re-spin”). The second problem is that simulation is, and has always been, too slow.
When Xilinx… Read More