Pro Design launches new CHIPit prototyping board for the verification of high-speed interfaces

New CHIPit PSX FPGA Virtex-5XT Rocket IO Board is the ideal prototyping solution for applications using high-speed serial interfaces like PCI Express, SATA, and Gigabit Ethernet

Munich, Germany – August 11, 2008 – ProDesign, leading provider of high-speed ASIC & SoC verification systems, today announced the launch of the new CHIPit PSX FPGA Virtex-5XT PCI Express RocketIO Board, a very flexible and powerful prototyping solution for the verification of designs with high-speed serial interfaces like PCI Express, SATA, and Gigabit Ethernet.

The prototyping board can be used in combination with the CHIPit QuickSilver platform board as a standalone system and can then be easily configured via JTAG interface or CF card. It is also seamlessly integrated into Pro Design’s CHIPit software to be configured and be used as extension board in any of the other CHIPit prototyping systems (Platinum, Iridium, or Copper Edition).

The new member of the CHIPit prototyping solutions family consists of an FPGA extension board (leveraging the advanced capabilities of Xilinx’s Virtex5 LXT or SXT series devices), a high-speed infiniband cable connection, and a PCI Express board (which is either plugged into a host workstation or can accommodate a PCI Express card). This flexibility enables the new board to work both as a PCI Express root complex or end point. The PCI-Express PHY is realized using the RocketI/Os of the FPGA. Support for one or four lanes is provided, resulting in a maximum data transfer rate of 2.5 GBit/s (one lane) or 10 GBit/s (four lanes).

Besides those RocketI/Os that are reserved for the PCI-Express interface, there are up to 16 additional general purpose RocketI/Os available (with a maximum data transfer rate of 3.2 GBit/s each) which can be used, i.e. to implement SATA or Gigabit Ethernet interfaces. On top of that, the board offers additional 320 free user I/O pins to connect to standard CHIPit or user specific extension boards and one Xilinx JTAG port for extended debugging and configuration.

“With the New CHIPit PSX FPGA Virtex-5XT Rocket IO Board, we reacted directly to the increasing requests from customers who asked for a solution to verify their designs with high-speed serial interfaces like PCI-Express in highest speed and in a complete system environment. With our new CHIPit member we could realize this challenging demand and present the ideal solution for the verification of today’s and tomorrow’s communication and consumer electronic designs” stated Gunnar Scholl, Director of Marketing and Business Development at ProDesign.

Availability

The PSX FPGA Virtex-5XT PCI-Express Rocket IO Board is available immediately.

About ProDesign

ProDesign is the creator of the CHIPit family of products for hardware assisted verification of ASIC and SoC designs. CHIPit provides a complete set of tools for design partitioning, implementation and debugging for any kind of hardware bring-up and software validation work. CHIPit is based on the great experience of a 27 years old veteran in the electronics market and has been a guarantor for successfully prototyping designs up to several million ASIC gates. ProDesign is one of the very few companies that can offer prototyping products together with additional service expertise to help its customers accomplish their goals.