Easy FPGA Prototyping
Prototyping your ASIC on an FPGA board is often the best way to assemble the software and hardware components of your end-product together to validate functionality. Especially with the latest generation of Virtex-5 chips from Xilinx, FPGA prototyping is a tempting approach.
Often however, designing the FPGA prototype becomes a project into itself that can take months on complex, multi-FPGA designs, voiding most of the benefits of prototyping.
Common problems with rolling your own FPGA prototype:
- modifying the ASIC RTL clock tree to match the FPGA's limited clock resources
- replacing complex ASIC memory models with FPGA equivalents
- reaching timing-closure on at-speed interfaces (PCIe, USB, Ethernet, etc...)
- partitioning your design across multiple FPGAs while still meeting timing constraints, achieving your speed goals
Any mistake with these tasks may mean painful debug to isolate the cause of the problem, time that is not spent debugging the final ASIC.
SEE ALSO
- Product: ZeBu-Personal
- Product: ZeBu-XXL
- Product: Validation IP
- Demo: Linux Boot
ZeBu Makes Prototyping Easy
ZeBu preserves the benefits of Prototyping with a set of features that guarantee you don't waste time on unproductive tasks:
- advanced compiler automatically converts ASIC constructs to FPGAs, so you don't have to change your RTL. The correct-by-contruction algorithms guarantee you won't waste time debugging FPGA issues, only functional problems in your product.
- full visibility of all signals at run-time without recompiling, so you can debug and find the root cause of a problem in minutes.
- An extensive catalog of Validation IP allows you to quickly build and prototype a full system with common interfaces, without having to worry about bridge conversion, buffering or at-speed issues.
- ZeBu includes its own custom clustering algorithm that take full advantage of dedicated hardware to perform time-multiplexing of signals, when required, at speeds not reachable by 3rd party solutions
Plus Zebu scales to a system as large as you want, so that if your design size increases, you can easily switch to a larger platform and reuse your existing setup.