Sitka platform

Features: Synopsys Inc., a semiconductor design software and First
Silicon Solutions (FS2), a division of MIPS Technologies Inc., has announced the
launch of the Sitka evaluation and development platform for Synopsys's
DesignWare PCI Express (PCIe) IP.



The Sitka board, which is the result of collaboration between the two companies,
functions as a standard PCIe add-in card with support for up to eight PCIe lanes
(each lane is a 2.5 Gbps communication channel), Synopsys said in a statement.




With this new platform, designers can test and debug their system-on-chip (SoC)
designs using the DesignWare PCIe IP while performing interoperability testing
between their SoC design and a PCIe PHY. Designers using the Sitka board to
prototype SoCs can reduce their design risk, cut development time and enable
predictable success in their complex SoCs.



Rick Leatherman, vice president and general manager of FS2, said, “Coupling
our expertise in hardware verification and debug technology with Synopsys's
expertise in PCI Express, we were able to create a solution that allows
designers to fully develop, test and debug their SoC designs with PCI Express
before committing to silicon.”



With the Sitka board, designers can prototype large designs by synthesizing
their SoC into two large on-board Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGAs. These two FPGAs are
interconnected through 272 I/O pins and can be configured for operating at up to
1 Gbps point-to-point interconnect, providing high throughput data transfers or
sets of unidirectional channels. The FPGAs are configured via the on-board ROM.
The ROM can hold multiple FPGA configurations allowing the designer to test
design variations and switch between different PHYs and the Xilinx Rocket I/O.