FPGA prototypes verify embedded MCU core designs

NEC Electronics America and Aptix Corp have developed a pre-silicon prototyping environment to support NEC Electronics' 32bit V850E1 embedded microcontroller core.

NEC Electronics America and Aptix Corp have developed a pre-silicon prototyping environment to support NEC Electronics' 32bit V850E1 embedded microcontroller core.

The new solution provides system designers of complex ASIC/SoC designs with a ready-made solution that enables customers to develop full prototypes of their systems in an affordable and efficient way.

To reduce overall design turnaround times, the new pre-silicon prototyping environment provides high-speed emulation capabilities for the verification, integration and validation of intellectual property and software in V850E1-based SoC designs.

As a mutual customer of Aptix and NEC Electronics America, Dotcast, a provider of broadband media delivery and management services, played a key role in the development of the ready-made system prototyping platform.

Tom Cowling, Engineering Program Manager at Dotcast, said, "The DNTSC-100 is Dotcast's SoC dNTSC demodulator.

This ASIC demodulates digital data from an ordinary NTSC television signal at datarates up to approximately 3Mbit/s.

The DNTSC-100 is the enabling technology for a last-mile solution to high-speed delivery of mass media services.

Using the FPGA implementation of the V850E1 core integrated with the rest of our design in a pre-silicon prototype on an Aptix System Explorer platform enabled us to validate our design at speeds one million times faster than software simulation".

"Customers developing ASIC designs based on NEC Electronics' popular V850E1 microcontroller core can quickly realise high-speed emulation capabilities with Aptix's ready-made prototyping solution", said Steve Ikei, Senior Engineering Manager, Microcontroller Strategic Business Unit, NEC Electronics America.

"Before taking a multi-million-gate ASIC design to silicon, it is crucial to validate the design at near real-time speeds.

By partnering with Aptix, our customers can test their solutions in real-world environments and make any necessary adjustments in minimal time".

Richard Newell, Director of Consulting Services at Aptix, added, "Our customers benefit tremendously from being able to run full designs at or near real-time speed before actual silicon is available.

With the availability of FPGA-ready code for the NEC Electronics' V850E1 core, we have dramatically cut the time to real-time validation for our customers who use this core in their products".

The prototyping platform for the V850E1 microcontroller core is available from Aptix as a "premapped" code module for the Xilinx Virtex-E family of high-performance FPGA devices.

This code module is available to Aptix customers who are also NEC Electronics V850E1 licensees.

The code module may be used with Aptix System Explorer prototype validation platforms, Aptix Software Integration Stations or with Aptix Prototype Studio/PCB for development of a custom, hard-wired pre-silicon prototype printed circuit board.

The V850E1core is an NEC Electronics proprietary 32bit embedded RISC microcontroller designed for embedded real-time applications for communications, computer, consumer, automotive, commercial and industrial products.

The V850E1 microcontroller core employs four sets of independent data buses with instruction and data cache memory.

This unique bus architecture provides 143MIPS at 100MHz system operation.

Xilinx Virtex-E FPGA-ready code for the NEC Electronics V850E1 microcontroller core is available from Aptix now at a price of $12,500.

Price and availability are subject to change.

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