Hardi announce FPGA-based HAPS-50 prototyping system

HARDI Electronics, a specialist in FPGA-based ASIC prototyping, today announced that it is releasing HAPS-50, the fourth generation of ASIC prototyping boards in its very popular HAPS series. This new family of motherboards is based on the largest FPGA available today, the Xilinx Virtex-5 LX330, and will help ASIC designers to verify their designs with better performance and larger capacity than ever before. As always with the HAPS system, several boards can be stacked or interconnected to handle virtually any ASIC size, even 30 million gates or more.

The first member in the new HAPS-50 family is HAPS-52 which has a capacity of 4 million ASIC gates. More boards in the series will be available within two months.

HAPS-52 has a number of important new features including more I/O and inter-FPGA connections, a global bus, more I/O-voltage regions and a more flexible clocking scheme. In addition, new functions provide improved monitoring and self-test, and remote configuration and setup of the board. Everything possible is made to reduce the time it takes to get the ASIC design running on this FPGA board.

HAPS-50 and Synplicity Total Recall technology
"The HAPS-50 boards are designed with the intention of supporting new features that will be needed when working with ESL tools," said Jonas Nilsson, CTO of HARDI. "We are working with Synplicity to make a complete verification system incorporating what ASIC designers need to quickly and accurately verify the ASIC they are working on. In addition to powerful and flexible hardware, software tools like Certify and Synplicity's Total Recall Technology will be essential as designs become larger and more complex."

"The combination of the HAPS-50 hardware and our Certify software and Total Recall debug technology, provides an extremely powerful environment for ASIC verification," stated Andy Haines, Senior VP of Marketing at Synplicity. "Synplicity and HARDI engineers are working closely together to make sure customers have a complete design flow with everything from partitioning, synthesis, place & route to debugging. Our software will be carefully tested and proven on the HAPS platforms."

The HAPS-50 series of motherboards is fully compatible with all previous generations, including the HAPS-10, HAPS-20 and the HAPS-30 families. In addition, it meets the HapsTrak standard, which guarantees that all HARDI standard daughter boards and all custom built boards will fit on the new system.

Click Here for a complete description of the HAPS-52.

Click Here for photos of the new motherboard.

Pricing and availability
The HAPS-52 board will be available for delivery to customers in April at the price of $47,000 USD. For sales offices and worldwide resellers, please visit: www.hardi.com/contact.htm.

About the HAPS prototyping system
HAPS (HARDI ASIC Prototyping System) is the first modular FPGA board system providing high speed, high capacity, real-time debugging and full ASIC functionality for ASIC prototyping designers. The system is composed of multi-FPGA motherboards and standard or user developed daughter boards. To accommodate very large designs, designers can connect several motherboards in many different ways. HAPS gives designers virtually the same functionality and performance as the ASIC.

About HARDI Electronics
Founded in 1987, HARDI Electronics is a pioneer in the field of advanced electronic design. The company's knowledge and experience ranges from SoC design using full custom ASICs to a wide variety of programmable logic designs. HARDI introduced its first ASIC prototyping product in 2000 and today has many successful installations in North America, Europe and Asia. HARDI is headquartered in Lund, Sweden, has a subsidiary in California, USA and many resellers all over the world. For more information, please visit the company's website at www.hardi.com.