Based Prototyping Of Fpga System-on-chip (soc)

With the development of Deep Sub-Micron (DSM) Technology in semiconductor technics and the development of EDA Technology also, The function of SoC(System on a Chip) becomes more and more powerful ,and verification becomes more and more important in SoC design. By Moore's Law, the verification problems are directly proportional to the square of the capacity. As the silicon capacity is doubling every 18 months, the difficulties of verification are doubling every 6-9 months. Today, Verification is the most time consuming part in SoC design flow, it can take 50 to 80 percent of all design work, Verification becomes the bottleneck of entire design flow. Now, verification activities have to be performed more efficiently to meet the requirement of Time-to-Market. So there must be found a way to meet the requirement.The FPGA-based Rapid System Prototype verification is the key to solve the problems of verification. It is one of the popular means of verification in SoC design. The essential of Rapid System Prototype verification is to implement the hardware module of SoC rapidly, make the sofeware module which on the real hardware running in high speed. Consequently make the HW/SW co- verification come true.Today, FPGA have unprecedented performance, and their density and complexity continue to grow at an incredible rate with multi-millions gates capability, imbedded microprocessors, IP logic blocks and multiple high speed interface standards, such as PCI Express, RapidIO and so on. And there are economic benefits as well. Because FPGA are programmable, a single FPGA design can be used in many end products. These characteristics made FPGA become ideal choice to verify SoC functions, and FPGAs give a good platform for Rapid System Prototype verification. FPGA is now satisfied the request of verification already in four aspects: system integration, system storage, system interface and system clock.