The Confirma Rapid Prototyping platform provides all the benefits of traditional hardware-assisted verification methods, but is more cost effective and efficient. The Confirma platform is ideal for ASIC/ASSP design and verification teams who need to leverage FPGA-based prototypes to improve their time-to-product and avoid costly device re-spins by helping them to find even the hardest-to-find hardware bugs, starting software development earlier in the design cycle and integrating hardware and software well ahead of chip fabrication.
Rapid Prototyping: the key to design success
As any ASIC designer knows, the success of large-budget ASIC projects depends on the up-front choices made for their verification. Because of the increase in design complexity, speed and large amounts of embedded software in today’s designs, the choice of the hardware-assisted verification method to be used is even more important to the design teams. Traditional hardware-assisted verification methods have not kept pace the changes in ASIC design and are putting an ever increasing burden on the design team.
Rapid Prototyping is fast and portable
The growing complexity of chip design and software content is increasing the cost of embedded software development and system validation. Traditional approaches such as “big-box” emulation systems are too expensive and slow for wide deployment to embedded software developers. Custom-built FPGA-based prototypes can address these issues but are difficult, time-consuming and expensive to implement and debug. The Confirma rapid prototyping platform solves the problems associated with these traditional approaches and brings together all if the critical components into a complete, affordable solution that enables more design teams to take advantage of the benefits of hardware-assisted verification.
For example, booting up cell phone operating system using traditional verification methods can take weeks or months, while booting up the same operating system in a hardware-assisted rapid prototyping verification environment takes minutes or even seconds (Figure 3). And because hardware-assisted verification prototypes provide high-performance, low cost of ownership and system portability, companies can easily provide these systems to various software development teams located around the world, allowing them to develop and test software in parallel.