Feature: Embedded design
Figure 2: (left to right) Flash board, J45 1G board and a DDR4 SODIMM
in the finished SoC and implemented as third-party IP. Assuming that the third-party vendors have already been selected, they may or may not provide FPGA models of their IP for a particular FPGA family. Models may or may not be accurate reproductions of the ASIC interface blocks’ functionality and may differ in timing. Implementing these interface blocks in the FPGA and verifying them could become a significant FPGA design project, drawing on critical interface and FPGA skills needed elsewhere in the design. An alternative is to design external
interface adapter cards to connect the real-world signals into the prototype system. Such an adapter can run at full real-world speed on the real-world side, and at the speed required by the FPGA prototype on the prototype side. Again, there are signifi cant issues. No
high-speed interface adapter is a trivial design, including supplies, clocking, board design and connector or cable analysis. T en there is the matter of getting the signals back and forth between the adapter card and the prototype system.
Running cables to the system backplane will introduce timing and signal integrity questions and will require precise understanding of the FPGA prototyping system’s internal design. Designing daughter cards to attach directly to expansion cards or to the FPGA cards themselves within the prototyping system will require a more detailed understanding of the system’s electrical, mechanical and thermal requirements.
The logical solution Siemens addresses this with a family of off-the-shelf extension boards for the Veloce proFPGA CS system. The family includes I/O adapters for
a range of interfaces, including Gigabit and slower Ethernet, PCIe GEN4, USB, DDR4, various Flash memory interfaces, and a range of connector configurations for bringing the FPGA I/O signals out of the box. Once such an I/O board, for example, combines Ethernet on an RJ45 connector, a USB connector with UART, a MIPI 60 connector, and a GPIO header, along with user-definable LEDs. The extender cards plug directly
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onto connectors on the FPGA boards, minimising latency and signal integrity issues. This also saves the user from having to provide clock and power sources for the boards. Supporting software integrates the extension boards into the FPGA-based prototyping development environment. The result is that users can quickly
connect a SoC prototype on the FPGA- based prototyping system into the actual environment in which the finished SoC will operate, with the interfaces operating at or near full speed. Software developers can instrument and observe the full software stack executing in the real world, not within the confines of synthetic I/O scripts. Hardware engineers can observe hardware/software interactions with live, real-world I/O at high speeds.
Example applications This ability to wrap the FPGA prototype in the intended real-world environment of network connections, sensors, actuators and displays is proving invaluable across a huge range of
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