FPGA Prototyping: From Homebrew to Integrated Solutions

By SemiWiki

September 16, 2015

Years ago, when FPGA prototyping started, there were no solutions that you could go out and buy and everything was created as a one-off: buy some FPGAs or an FPGA-based board, and put it all together. It was a lot of effort, nobody really knew in advance how long it would take, there was very limited visibility for debug and the whole thing was basically unsupportable. There is more discipline these days but even so, roughly half of all FPGA prototyping is done in a proprietary way that doesn't scale as designs get larger and lacks more and more desirable features. The other half of the market uses an integrated solution that ties together FPGA-based hardware, the software for getting the design up and running, debug and daughter boards for hardware interfaces.

Last week I talked to Johannes Stahl of Synopsys about the new solution that they are announcing today.

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