Date: 06/03/2011

Practical online guide on how to use FPGAs for SoC chip design

Synopsys in collaboration with Xilinx has made available the FPGA-based Prototyping Methodology Manual (FPMM), a practical guide for using FPGAs as a platform for system-on-chip (SoC) development. This will be a great help for complex semiconductor chips designers who generally use FPGA chips for prototyping their SoC. The FPMM has design guide material from engineering teams from BBC Research & Development; Design of System on Silicon, S.A. (DS2); Freescale Semiconductor; LSI, Inc.; NVIDIA Corp.; STMicroelectronics; and Texas Instruments (TI), which have successfully employed FPGA-based prototyping to accelerate complex ASIC and SoC development projects.

For the people who are looking for a kind of tutorial material for FPGA design, this e-book type online material guides on FPGA-based prototyping, including understanding the challenges and benefits of prototyping, the implementation of a SoC design in FPGA, and finally, its use for software and system validation.
This online, interactive learning material for VLSI engineers who use FPGA for prototyping their designs is available at www.synopsys.com/fpmm, where prototypers can raise challenges and exchange best practices.

FPMM written by Doug Amos and René Richter of Synopsys and Austin Lesea of Xilinx are experts in FPGA technology and prototyping of designs using FPGAs. This books is written both for entry level semiconductor chip designers as well as experienced teams and project leaders. FPMM outlines surveying the range of prototyping options, from virtual prototyping through building custom boards to purchasing complete prototyping systems, the FPMM and also Design-for-Prototyping. Design-for-Prototyping integrates FPGA-based prototyping seamlessly into the ASIC/SoC project so that the design can be more readily implemented and made available at the earliest opportunity to the end-users. This approach delivers productivity benefits by connecting to system-level tools like virtual prototyping for earlier software development and during the crucial later stages of a project when hardware and software are integrated for the first time.

"The FPMM will be an invaluable resource to ASIC designers and prototypers because it is the industry's first attempt to collect in one volume information to outline the challenges and solutions for successfully prototyping ASIC designs in FPGA hardware," said Vincent Ratford, senior vice president of worldwide marketing and business development at Xilinx. "Xilinx Virtex FPGA devices have been extensively used for ASIC prototyping because of their high logic capacity, and we expect that trend will continue with the delivery of 2 million logic element devices in our 28nm Virtex-7 family."

"Synopsys has a long history of publishing methodology manuals that have been widely used by designers to help them be more productive. The collaboration between Synopsys and Xilinx, with contributions by noted industry leaders in prototyping, has made it possible to capture best practices in the FPMM. This has paved the way for other users to learn from this experience and help speed system validation," said John Chilton, senior vice president of marketing and strategic development, Synopsys.


The FPMM contains 15 comprehensive chapters and two appendices that cover real-world examples. The manual is organized into chapters that parallel the tasks and decisions faced during an FPGA-based prototyping project. The chapters are also designed to stand alone, allowing the manual to be used as a reference.