ProDesign is back

12/12/2012 11:07 AM EST

There are times when the EDA industry seems like the game of Whack-a-Mole. A group of people develop a successful product, it gets bought by someone and the original team “do their time” and then leave to start up a new company – often in a different area, but sometimes , like in this story, doing what I can only presume they believed the acquiring company should have been doing all along with their technology.

This is indeed what happened with ProDesign (Why is it that companies want to SHOUT their names these days. It looks ugly and and I will not all caps the name), a company that developed an FPGA prototyping system called CHIPit which was acquired by Synopsys at the end of 2008. A few days ago they announced their reformation and the release of their first product. You may have guessed correctly, it is another FPGA prototyping system and what they believe is a modular, scalable, flexible high-end FPGA prototyping solution.

Just like Synopsys’ recent announcement, it is based on the new Xilinx Virtex 7 FPGAs. Their board has 4 of them along with availability of various daughter boards for things such as DDR3, high-speed interfaces, PCIe, USB 3.0, Gigabit Ethernet etc.

The motherboard takes four exchangeable proFPGA Xilinx Virtex 7 XCV2000T FPGA modules offering up to 48 M ASIC gates capacity. Multiple proFPGA quad systems can be stacked or connected together to provide scalability and in their words - no theoretical maximum in capacity. The boards, together with the high-speed connectors, allow a maximum point to point speed of up to 1.2 Gbps over the standard FPGA I/O and up to 12.5 Gbps over the high speed gigabit transceivers of the FPGA.