Emulation Whack-a-Mole

2/22/2013 11:47 AM EST

Gone are the days when a prototyping company tries to do it all and in many cases you have to ask which is more important – the hardware or software, something reminiscent of many other products developed these days. The tasks of partitioning, mapping, debugging the design and connecting the design up to testbenches, virtual models and even to the real-world take a lot of time and effort.

The new company is Reflex CES - located just outside of Paris, and very close to the location where Mentor’s emulation efforts are centered. It must be something in the water there that makes people want to build such things. Reflex has been working on FPGA-based systems for embedded systems, primarily targeted towards military applications. Now they want to utilize their skill set to construct a more general purpose product. This is also similar to the development of Mentor’s (Meta) emulator which was originally funded by the French military). However, there do not seem to be any other similarities between them.

Prototyping a typical chip requires multiple FPGAs and this is both difficult and time consuming and thus partitioning is important. When more than one FPGA is used you need to have high-speed communications between them and that adds to the skillset required to create a prototype.

A European program brought three companies together to create the product and Reflex is the primary company that sells the entire product. The other two companies are Flexras and Adacsys. Flexras provides the partition tools that take a design and divide it between the available FPGAs and Adacsys has a suite of functional verification tools that extend the capabilities of the built in ChipScope capabilities.

The FPP25 prototyping platform operates with a GbE interface, a USB interface or a 4-lane PCIe cable (GEN2). A single FPP25 platform can emulate up to 25-million ASIC gates using three high density Virtex-7 FPGAs (two XC7V2000Ts and one XC7VX485T). The third FPGA is primarily used for interfacing. Each Virtex-7 2000T FPGA intercommunicates by nearly 400 LVDS signals at 1.25Gbps. An onboard CPU with an embedded Linux operating system is implemented to handle the configuration and monitoring functions. FPP25 platforms can be chained together (up to 5 platforms) to address high density designs of over 125 million ASIC gates.

They are also working on things such as Gigabit Ethernet daughter cards and will have several others available later this year. They are also developing a board using Zynq Z-7045 so that it can be used for ARM SoC prototyping.

They will be looking for early customers in France but hope to sign up distributors in the US and Asia as well. They hope to target small to medium sized projects and initially will be looking towards the hardware guys for chip verification opportunities and later for software verification and validation.