Modern SoC Evaluation Boards demand high-performance design, SI/PI, and system validation. Faraday offers 3 flexible service levels to meet these complexities.
As SoC designs become more demanding, with more functions, higher pin counts, higher frequencies, and lower voltages, evaluation boards have become integral to the overall SoC project. High-performance boards are necessary to bring up and evaluate high-performance silicon. The board’s own limitations must not stand in the way of measuring the operating voltage range, operating frequency, and noise sensitivity, for example.
Increasingly, evaluation boards are used not only to characterize the silicon but also to perform system-level validation of the SoC and its application stack. So, the evaluation board must support all the functions and interfaces the system will use in the wild.
These requirements have pushed SoC evaluation boards far beyond just being a convenient way to hold a prototype SoC on an engineer’s bench. To do its job, the board must allow the SoC to operate in its intended environment, over its full range of operating conditions.