News and New Products

EDA start-up GateRocket brings hardware-based accelerator to FPGA designers

By Michael Santarini, Senior Editor -- EDN, 4/23/2007

EDA start-up called GateRocket Inc wants to bring hardware-assisted verification to designers programming the biggest FPGAs from Xilinx and Altera and claims that its mixed-hardware-and-software approach will provide a 10- to 1000-times speedup in the simulation of these FPGAs. EDA veteran Dave Orecchio, GateRocket’s chief executive officer, says that Altera’s Stratix and Xilinx’s Virtex devices are so large that most designers must simulate their FPGA designs before they can program them into the FPGA. Traditionally, FPGAs haven’t required this step. Designers could simply program their designs into the targeted FPGA and then test that their design runs as they expected. If the design wasn’t running as they expected, they simply changed the design and reprogrammed the device, repeating the procedure until it worked correctly.

“These big FPGAs are too big for the ‘blow-and-go’ methodology” where users design the chip and try it,” says Orecchio. “The methodology is divergent. Some people doing small chips still use that methodology, but we’re focused on the larger chips where that methodology doesn’t work. And most designers using blow and go will tell you that, once they program the chip and it’s in their end system, they can’t figure out what’s wrong with it.” As a result, many designers working with the largest FPGAs test their designs with simulation before they program the FPGAs. But Orecchio claims that conventional simulation is too slow and, in some cases, inaccurate. “It’s pretty common that if you are working with third IP [intellectual-property] blocks that the simulation model you get from the IP vendor is very different from the physical version of the IP,” says Orecchio. “That can cause a lot of problems.”

The company’s 5.5-in., disk-drive-sized RocketDrive simulation accelerator contains a version of the targeted FPGA. The “device-native” product contains the same FPGA you are targeting for your end design, meaning that, when users program their design into it, they get a true representation of the functions of the design running on the targeted FPGA, says Orecchio. So far, the company fields versions of the RocketDrive containing either an Altera Stratix 2 device or a Virtex 4 device, depending on your targeted FPGA. The company plans to offer new versions of the RockDrive supporting Vertex-5 and Stratix-III.

Chris Schalick, GateRocket’s vice president of engineering and chief technology officer, developed the RocketDrvie, which users can insert into their workstations or PCs. Alternatively, they can buy a rack of RocketDrives in a PC-tower configuration, connecting the drives to their workstation through a PCIe (PCI Express) interface card. A user can place an entire FPGA or a part of one into the RocketDrive system and then run tests on it, with the testbench or the remainder of the design running on their choice of commercial-logic simulator, such as Incisive, ModelSim, or VCS. Designers can also use the system for software development.

The package also includes the RocketVision software, which facilitates the simulator-to-RocketDrive connection and RocketDrive programming. RocketDrive is compatible with FPGA-vendor programming tools and third-party FPGA-synthesis tools.

GateRocket doesn’t yet have any customers, but Orecchio says the company is just now launching the product, and the prospective market is big and growing. Traditionally, FPGA vendors sold the bulk of their largest FPGAs to ASIC designers, who use the FPGAs to prototype ASIC designs. That scenario is now changing, according to Orecchio. Most of the mammoth FPGA-design starts are targeting the use of high-end FPGAs in end products, such as medical and networking equipment, automotive applications, and test equipment. He also points out that the number of FPGA starts is increasing, whereas ASIC starts have been decreasing in numnber. “From my analysis in looking through Altera and Xilinx annual reports, roughly 24% of their customers are using these large FPGAs,” says Orecchio. The portion of that 24% who are planning to use FPGAs in end products is GateRocket’s target audience. Designers could use the technology for prototyping smaller ASICs or for either FPGA or ASIC in-circuit emulation. But, for now, the company’s focusing on supporting its use as simulation accelerator for big FPGAs. Prices for GateRocket’s RocketDrive start at $25,000.