FPGA-based prototyping has always been something of an assembly-required construction kit. Consequently, getting to a functional and usable prototype took a lot of effort, time, and a ‘do it yourself’ attitude. Once up and running, however, the reward justified the effort by providing a fast pre-silicon verification platform, with frequencies often running at tens of megahertz and reducing verification workload runs from days to minutes.
Then chip designs exploded in complexity, software content increased exponentially, and the sheer amount of data going in and out of an SoC grew by orders of magnitude. And let’s not forget that design cycles shrank at the same time. FPGA-based prototype platforms, uniquely suited to address those challenges, have become essential to SoC verification and system validation.
As all this change was happening, prototyping evolved as well. Today it is no longer a construction kit, but a ready-to-use, comprehensive solution that delivers significant productivity gains.
You might ask, what are the primary attributes of this evolved FPGA-based prototyping platforms? Obviously, it’s hardware consisting of one or more FPGAs!
It’s also the software that takes the ASIC RTL and intelligently maps it into the collection of FPGAs.
It’s also a test environment that stimulates the design, often with live system interfaces like sensors, cameras, and ethernet traffic.
