There is more to prototyping than just FPGA: See how S2C accelerates SoC Bring-Up with high productivity toolchain?

System-on-Chip designs continue to grow in scale and interface diversity, placing greater demands on prototype capacity, interconnect planning, and bring-up efficiency. These challenges arise not only in large multi-FPGA programs but also in smaller designs implemented on a single device or a small FPGA cluster. In all cases, teams must build a representative verification environment, manage logic operating at different rates, and isolate functional issues with minimal iteration time.

S2C’s FPGA solution addresses these needs through a structured prototyping ecosystem that combines automation software, implementation flows, system IP, and hardware expansion options to support efficient and predictable SoC bring-up across a wide range of design scales.

Building a Scalable System-Level Prototyping Methodology

A predictable and efficient bring-up process depends on tight coordination between software automation and hardware infrastructure. S2C’s PlayerPro™ CT software supports both automatic and guided partitioning, including interconnect planning for designs that span multiple FPGAs. Timing-driven and congestion-aware algorithms help improve partition quality and stability. For designs that do not require partitioning, PlayerPro CT also enhances gated-clock conversion and memory mapping, improving overall implementation robustness.

The RTL Compile Flow (RCF) further streamlines implementation by reducing memory footprint, improving iteration turnaround, and maintaining RTL-level visibility for downstream debug. These capabilities are valuable not only for large multi-FPGA designs, but also for projects that ultimately fit into a single FPGA yet still require controlled timing convergence and manageable compile cycles during early architectural exploration.

Clock-domain and rate matching are common requirement when integrating subsystems with different clock frequencies or operating characteristics. In practical SoC bring-up, many IP blocks—such as memory controllers, external interfaces, or third-party subsystems—are often unable to operate at their final target frequencies during early prototyping stages.

S2C addresses this challenge by providing Memory Models and Speed Adapters that decouple functional validation from frequency constraints. These mechanisms allow subsystems to run at reduced or independent rates while preserving correct transaction ordering, protocol behavior, and system-level interactions.

A representative system environment also depends on access to the appropriate peripheral interfaces without extensive custom hardware development. S2C offers a broad portfolio of daughter cards covering high-speed connectivity, memory, storage, display, and general-purpose interfaces. PCIe EP/RC, Mini-SAS, USB PHY, and SFP+/QSFP+ modules support high-bandwidth links; DDR4, LPDDR4, eMMC, and Flash modules enable memory subsystem evaluation; HDMI, DisplayPort, and MIPI D-PHY daughter cards support video and imaging use cases. GPIO headers, JTAG modules, and SerDes extensions enable signal probing and low-speed peripheral access. Together, these hardware options help teams reproduce system-level conditions that closely reflect the target deployment environment.

System-Level Debug Visibility

Debug is a critical part of prototype validation, and S2C provides mechanisms that deliver visibility at multiple levels of the system.

At the I/O level, engineers can validate basic functionality using push buttons, DIP switches, GPIOs, and UART interfaces. PlayerPro also enables virtual access to these controls, supporting remote operation and simplifying early functional checks.

For bus-level visibility, S2C offers ProtoBridge, which uses a PCIe connection to provide high-throughput transaction access suitable for software-driven stimulus generation and data movement. NTBus provides an alternative lower-bandwidth access path over embedded Ethernet.

Signal-level visibility is supported through probe insertion and waveform capture. MDM Pro enables concurrent capture of up to 16K signals across as many as eight FPGAs, with deep trace storage and support for both IP-mode and compile-time configurations—often without requiring a full recompile.

Conclusion

With a structured prototyping ecosystem and a comprehensive debug infrastructure, S2C’s Prodigy prototyping solution provides a stable foundation for building, scaling, and validating FPGA-based prototypes. Whether used for single-FPGA bring-up or large multi-board configurations, S2C enables teams to create representative verification environments, balance subsystem operation, and efficiently isolate functional issues throughout the SoC development cycle.

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