Expanded Confirma prototyping platform introduced

Following a strategy that began with the acquisition of Synplicity, Synopsys Inc. introduced its expanded Confirma rapid prototyping platform. The addition of the recently acquired CHIPit products, tools and technologies simplifies the implementation and deployment of rapid prototypes, allowing users to begin hardware-assisted system validation and embedded software development sooner than using other Synopsys products. Complementing the HAPS high-performance prototyping hardware, the expanded Confirma platform now also offers a software-configurable architecture and transaction-based co-verification capability.

With this product, Synopsys diverges somewhat from the company's usual market strategy. Instead of targeting the leading edge, top of the market pyramid users, the product is designed to appeal to developers using FPGA-based prototyping tools.

Forget the traditional approaches
Tom Borgstrom, director of solutions marketing at the company, points out that the growing complexity of chip design and software content is increasing the cost of embedded software development and system validation. Traditional approaches such as "big-box" emulation systems are too expensive and slow for wide deployment to embedded software developers and verification teams.

Custom-built FPGA-based prototypes can address these issues but are difficult, time-consuming and expensive to implement and debug. The Confirma rapid prototyping platform helps solve the problems associated with these traditional approaches. It also brings all the critical components together into a comprehensive and affordable solution that enables more design teams to take advantage of the benefits of hardware-assisted verification.

The expanded Confirma platform consists of both hardware and software components. It provides hardware products for rapid prototyping including FPGA-based prototyping systems and boards, interface and memory boards, and implementation and debug software.

The CHIPit family completes the hardware portion of the family. It features a programmable interconnect architecture. It provides emulation-like capabilities optimized for transaction-based verification HAPS family of rapid prototyping boards for system validation and embedded software development. And it also offers a collection of high-speed interface and expansion boards that can be customized.

The software portion of the family includes the CHIPit Manager Pro prototype configuration and project management software, the Standard Co-Emulation Modeling Interface compliant transaction-based co-verification interface, and all of the tools the company obtained with the Synplicity acquisition.

Synopsys is planning a series of educational half-day management seminars and full-day hands-on technical workshops focused on rapid prototyping starting in February 2009.

- Gabe Moretti
EDA DesignLine