Michael (Mick) Posner joined Synopsys in 1994 and is currently Director of Product Marketing for Synopsys' FPGA-Based Prototyping Solutions. Previously, he has held various product marketing, application consultant and technical marketing manager positions at Synopsys. He holds a Bachelor Degree in Electronic and Computer Engineering from the University of Brighton, England.
I/O, I/O, it’s off to work I go
Posted by Michael Posner on August 15th, 2012
In a related question (refer to my previous blog post) what I/O interfaces do you utilize on your FPGA-based prototype and what are you using that interface for? Below is the latest snapshot of interface usage from the FPMM survey data.
I have a *guess* that much of the USB 2.0 and some of the Ethernet usage is for control and configuration of the prototyping design. I have mixed feelings on the PCI E Gen 2 usage as this is a typical interface used in many designs but it also makes for a high bandwidth streaming interface. For example the Synopsys Universal Multi-Resource Bus, UMRBus for short, makes use of a PCI E interface.
The advantage of the UMRBus over just using a PCI E interface is that the UMRBus provides a high performance and low latency link to the HAPS FPGA-based prototype with zero pin overhead. Add UMRBus capabilities without disrupting your partition! Cool. In addition the UMRBus comes with a ready to utilize software APIÂ which makes it simple to integrate into your validation environment.
What are you using your interfaces for and what are they?
