November 15, 2000

Market windows
Alliance aims to make SOCs available to all

Planning and producing compelling products in time to reach tight market windows continues to be a chief concern for convergence project teams. Moreover, cost demands increasingly mean that the team must turn to system-on-chip (SOC) technologies to minimize the cost of the final product. But an SOC design can mean high nonrecurring engineering cost up front and production delays at the back end.

The answer may lie in venerable programmable-logic technology, which, thanks to geometry shrinks, can now accommodate robust SOC designs.

In fact, Xilinx, IBM, The MathWorks, Wind River Systems, Mentor Graphics, and Synopsys intend to make SOC capabilities accessible to all via Xilinx FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays).

The challenges with any SOC effort include gathering the intellectual property required, designing the chip, developing the software, and fabricating the final product. This partnership, the Platform FPGA Initiative, has addressed all facets of the problem.

Most convergence-era products require both traditional processors and DSP functions for tasks such as audio processing or communication links. In this initiative, IBM will supply its PowerPC processor core and The MathWorks will supply DSP technology. In Xilinx's Virtex-II FPGA, the PowerPC can operate at 300 MHz, delivering 420 Dhrystone MIPs. Xilinx's embeddable XtremeDSP core can perform 600 billion MAC (multiply accumulate) operations per second, which the design team can access with the MatLab toolkit from The MathWorks. Xilinx offers a host of I/O interfaces to complement the processor and DSP functions.

Meanwhile, the project team can use design-automation tools from Synopsys and Mentor Graphics to both lay out and verify the FPGA simultaneously, thereby helping meet market windows. The Wind River operating system further speeds the process via simultaneous software development. The cooperative of partners eliminates the up front cost of acquiring intellectual property. And the FPGA realization of the finished product provides instant gratification.

Sound like a scenario that's too good to be true? We'll have to wait and see. The overall capabilities of the partnership are impressive, but sometimes six-headed monsters are hard to keep on a straight track. Moreover, SOCs based on traditional ASIC technology will maintain performance and power-consumption advantages. Still, the FPGA alternative will surely appeal to smaller companies from which much of the convergence era innovation will come.

—Maury Wright