S2C ProtoBridge AXI Expands FPGA-Based Prototype Usage

Acceleration of virtual prototype development, RTL verification and SoC software validation

San Jose, CA – July 2, 2014 - S2C Inc., a leading SoC/ASIC rapid prototyping solutions provider, today announced that its ProtoBridge™ AXI now supports AXI-4 protocol with flexible bus width at an improved data transmission speed. Protobridge™ AXI is an FPGA-accelerated verification tool that enables designers to read and write data from computers to AXI-based designs mapped to FPGA-based prototypes. By utilizing a rich set of C subroutine calls, ProtoBridge AXI users can easily implement algorithm validation, block-level prototyping, full-chip simulation acceleration, corner case testing and early SoC software development.

ProtoBridge™ AXI consists of a computer software component and a FPGA design component. The computer software component contains Linux/Windows drivers and a set of C-API/DPI routines to perform AXI transactions. The FPGA design component contains a PCIe, an interconnection module and AXI transactors to be instantiated in users’ design-under-test (DUT). With these enhanced product features, users can read and write at speeds of up to 500 megabytes per second through the PCIe interface, connect 8 Master devices and 8 Slave devices on the AXI bus, and take advantage of the patent pending Shared Memory technology that link the FPGA prototype with third party design tools.

“FPGA-based prototypes today are predominantly used at late design stages such as system validations and software developments. Our customers have requested us to provide solutions for earlier design stages.” said Toshio Nakama, Chief Executive Officer of S2C. “S2C’s ProtoBridge™ AXI software has already been deployed at a number of S2C customer sites and delivered great results. We are pleased to release the updated version of ProtoBridge™ AXI which facilitates designers to maximize the benefits of FPGA-based prototypes early in the design project for algorithm validation, IP design, simulation accelerations and corner case testing.”

“We at Fulhan Microelectronics are happy to use ProtoBridge™ AXI in our design project”, said Gao Houxin, R & D Director of Fullhan Microelectronics. “Fullhan is a worldwide leading supplier of video surveillance chips and system solutions. High-performance H.264 Video Encoder is one of our major products, and our design challenge is the short market window. The video streams to be tested on the design are huge in size, and we don’t want to put all that testing work late in the FPGA prototyping stage. We utilized ProtoBridge™ AXI’s C-API functions and successfully transferred the video streams to and from the design blocks mapped on FPGAs to finish testing early in the block design stage, and that shortened our H.264 project design cycle”.

Prototyping Platform Supported

S2C’s ProtoBridge AXI supports S2C’s V7 and K7 TAI Logic Module Series by connecting through a S2C 4-lane PCIe Gen2 GTX Module. The V7 TAI Logic Modules can prototype SoC/ASIC designs up to 80 Million ASIC gates on a single board and multiple TAI Logic Modules can be stacked or tiled to meet higher gate capacity requirements. For more information about ProtoBridge AXI and its supported hardware, please visit ProtoBridge AXI product page on S2C website.

About S2C

Founded and headquartered in San Jose, California, S2C has been successfully delivering rapid SoC prototyping solutions since 2003. S2C provides:

• Rapid FPGA-based prototyping hardware and automation software
• Prototype Ready™ IP, Platforms, and Accessories
• System-level design verification and acceleration tools

S2C solution enables designers to rapidly create SoC prototypes that can run at or close to real time speed, enabling comprehensive hardware verification and early software developments. S2C’s flexible, expandable and reusable hardware architecture combined with transaction-based links to system simulations make S2C solution an ideal common platform for major design phases from algorithm exploration, IP design, system integration to compatibility testing. S2C currently has offices in the US, Europe, Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, and India. For more information, visit www.s2cinc.com.