Pre-& post silicon validation

FPGA PROTOTYPING

Need for FPGA Prototyping

Today’s off-the-shelf FPGA prototyping systems have established their value in every stage of the system-on-chip (SoC) design flow. Moving beyond traditional applications such as in-circuit testing and early software development, this technology has expanded to encompass functional design and verification
FPGA-based prototypes work with electronic system level (ESL) design environments to refine, validate, and implement the chip’s architecture, and with simulation tools to achieve an order of magnitude (or more) increase in verification speed.
The FPGA prototyping system must offer enterprise-wide accessibility — a complete prototyping platform is one that operates at any functional design stage, with any design size, and across multiple geographical locations. All these capabilities must be available on-demand and be remotely-accessible always. Such an approach significantly increases engineering productivity and reduces the end-product’s time to market, while increasing its return on investment (ROI), as well as increasing the lifetime ROI of the FPGA prototyping platform itself.

Growing SoC design challenges

SoC size and complexity are increasing at an exponential rate. According to a keynote presentation by Gary Smith at the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors Conference in 2013, potentially available SoC gate counts will quadruple from 420 million in 2014 to 1.68 billion in 2020. International Business Strategies (IBS) reported that software development and hardware verification are the two leading factors in total SoC design cost (see Figure).

FPGA-based prototyping solutions: Addressing today’s needs

For an FPGA prototype to meet the requirements of this “whole design”, it must address the following criteria:

User access

Compile/partition efficiency

System interface capability

Scalability

Extensibility

Reusability

Analysis and debug capability

Application throughout the functional design flow

Post-silicon validation:

During the pre-silicon process, engineers test devices in a virtual environment with sophisticated simulation, emulation, and formal verification tools. In contrast, post-silicon validation tests occur on actual devices running at-speed in commercial, real-world system boards using logic analyser and assertion-based tools.

Post-silicon validation, on the other hand, benefits from very high raw performance, since tests are executed directly on manufactured silicon. At the same time, it poses several challenges to traditional validation methodologies, because of the limited internal observability and difficulty of applying modifications to manufactured silicon chips. These two factors lead in turn to critical challenges in error diagnosis and correction.

Our Offerings

We offer complex design FPGA Prototyping solutions for various customers on Xilinx and Altera platforms for IP like (PCIe GEN 4 IP, PCIe Gen4 Switch,25g Ethernet mac). we are expertise in prototyping solution by providing our customers a complete working solution for validating there IP.

Silicon Verification Services:

Pre-silicon RTL verification

Behavioral models/components for verification

Test bench and test scripts generation

Proof-of-concept & performance tuning on FPGA platforms

Bring-up and Validation:

Bring-up boards for silicon wake-up & validation

Test vector FPGAs for stress testing and measurements