FPGA DESIGN AND EMULATION
FPGAs – soft silicon for hard problems.
We don’t leave home without one.
FPGAs are truly the wild card in the hardware engineer’s design pack. Ignitarium has used FPGAs to enable compute intensive low volume system realizations and to create quick prototypes. We have worked on emulation of complex Multimedia SoCs partitioned across multiple FPGAs. Armed with alliance partnerships of Xilinx and Intel-Altera, we are today a key partner for many a system company in their FPGA based product deployments.
Do it right with Ignitarium
FPGA based products: System Architecture to product testing
Ignitarium has deep understanding of various FPGA families and their key differentiators. We have tools for early analysis and selection coupled with years of experience working on multiple FPGA based designs. Our competencies include :
- System architecture and FPGA selection
- Software-hardware partitioning
- Creating a microarchitecture using FPGA-vendor provided IPs and Custom IPs
- Converting custom algorithms to efficient code
- FPGA synthesis and time closure
- FPGA testing using customer software and test equipment like frame grabbers and protocol analyzers
- Final product testing
FPGA Prototypes: Enabling early design confidence
An early confidence metric that semiconductor companies look forward to, before starting down the path of a costly ASIC design, is to create a quick FPGA based prototype of their custom logic or algorithm. At Ignitarium, our combined hardware and software teams have created many ASIC prototypes using FPGAs by performing the following sub tasks:
- Selection of an off-the-shelf FPGA platform to enable the prototype
- Evaluate whether the custom algorithm could be ported using available High Level Synthesis tools or using Matlab. If performance targets cannot be met, hand-code the algorithm into HDL
- Develop associated software test frameworks using QT or other similar platforms
- Synthesis and Bitfile generation
- Testing the prototype using the test framework
Emulation: Accelerating software cycles
Emulation has become an integral part of the SoC design flow to enable early software development and enhance confidence on silicon. Ignitarium has expertise in emulation boxes like Palladium, Veloce and Zebu as well as mainstream FPGA-based emulation boards like HAPS and Prodesign FPGA. Our emulation expertise includes:
- SoC Partitioning across multiple FPGAs
- Porting technology specific cells to FPGA cells
- RTL changes for handling clock and reset through FPGA specific components like DCMs and PLLs
- Changes specific to Analog macros and PHY interfaces
- Synthesis and timing closure
- Diagnostic testing
- Working closely with the software team to enable debug
Case Studies
FPGA DESIGN AND EMULATION
FPGA Emulation of a Quad Core A9 based Multimedia SoC
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FPGA DESIGN AND EMULATION
FPGA Emulation for ARM Based Processor
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Case Studies
