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

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FPGA Prototypes graphic

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

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Case Studies

FPGA Emulation of a Quad Core A9 based Multimedia SoC







    Quick Prototyping of a new Audio Standard







      Display Port Based Multi Channel Video processing Unit







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