HARDI Electronics Introduces A PCI-X Interface for Its ASIC Prototyping System At electronicaUSA, Booth #534.Business EditorselectronicaUSA 2004 LUND, Sweden--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 24, 2004 The new board gives designers two options to connect an ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) Pronounced "a-sick." A chip that is custom designed for a specific application rather than a general-purpose chip such as a microprocessor. prototype to a PCI-X (PCI eXtended) An enhanced PCI bus technology originally developed by IBM, HP and Compaq that is backward compatible with existing PCI cards. PCI and 32-bit PCI-X slots are physically the same, and PCI cards can plug into PCI-X slots. bus -- directly or through a simple local bus interface HARDI HARDI Heating, Airconditioning & Refrigeration Distributors International HARDI High Angular Resolution Diffusion Imaging HARDI Harmonisation des actions pour la Réalisation d'un Développement Intégré Electronics AB, a pioneer in high performance ASIC prototyping, today announced the availability of a new daughter board that will give customers PCI/PCI-X connectivity to the company's HAPS prototyping system. The new board, called PCIX, will be shown for the first time at the electronicaUSA Conference in San Francisco, Calif., March 29-April 1 (HARDI Booth #534). HAPS is a modular ASIC prototyping system providing real-time speed, real-time debugging and full ASIC functionality for ASIC prototyping designers. The PCIX board serves a dual purpose, both as a platform for verifying PCI-X cores and as a direct connection between a HAPS system and a PCI/PCI-X bus. Furthermore, for greater flexibility, designers have the option of either placing the PCIX board in a PCI (1) (Payment Card Industry) See PCI DSS. (2) (Peripheral Component Interconnect) The most widely used I/O bus (peripheral bus). (or PCI-X) slot in a computer or stacking it directly on a HAPS motherboard. If placed in a computer, high-speed cables are available for the connection to an external HAPS motherboard. An alternative is to stack HAPS daughter boards, such as FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) A type of gate array that is programmed in the field rather than in a semiconductor fab. Containing up to hundreds of thousands of gates, there are a variety of FPGA architectures on the market. _2x3 and memory boards, directly on the PCIX board, with everything placed inside a PC. The new PCIX board is compatible with both 32 and 64 bit PCI-X buses in frequencies up to 133 MHz. The board can also be used in a standard PCI environment. "Many designs are difficult to partition between a single-FPGA PCI board and the rest of the prototype system," stated Jonas Nilsson, technical manager at HARDI Electronics. "The required bandwidth between the two halves is just too high. Our modular system allows the massive amount of I/O (Input/Output) The transfer of data between the CPU and a peripheral device. Every transfer is an output from one device and an input to another. See PC input/output. I/O - Input/Output available on our standard FPGA_2x3 board to be used for that communication. And if that's not enough, stacking the PCIX board directly on a large HAPS mother board will remove the bottleneck completely." An important advantage using the PCIX board for verifying PCI/PCI-X cores is that the PCI/PCI-X bus is not disturbed even if the design under test is not behaving properly. Another unique feature is that the PCI/PCI-X core can run at a lower speed than the actual speed of the PCI/PCI-X bus. The speed difference is totally transparent to the designer, eliminating time-consuming redesigns since the designer no longer has to be concerned with synchronizing the various speeds of the different buses. The PCIX board can also be used to set up a fast communication link between a computer and the ASIC prototype. The PCIX board provides a bridge between the PCI/PCI-X bus and a simpler local bus. The HAPS system then uses the local bus to pass test vectors and debug information to and from the PCI host, without the need for an FPGA based PCI/PCI-X core. A JTAG (Joint Test Action Group) An IEEE standard for boundary scan technology. See scan technology. JTAG - Joint Test Action Group controller on the PCIX board makes it possible to download programming data and configure a HAPS system via the PCI/PCI-X bus. Windows and Linux drivers, as well as software for communication with Verilog and VHDL (VHSIC Hardware Description Language) A hardware description language (HDL) used to design electronic systems at the component, board and system level. VHDL allows models to be developed at a very high level of abstraction. simulators via PLI and VHPI VHPI VHDL Procedural Interface (VLSI) , are provided free of charge by HARDI Electronics. Pricing and Availability The PCIX board is available today. US pricing starts at $2,990. European pricing is EUR EUR In currencies, this is the abbreviation for the Euro. Notes: The currency market, also known as the Foreign Exchange market, is the largest financial market in the world, with a daily average volume of over US $1 trillion. 2,495. For more information about the company's prototyping products, please visit: http://www.hardi.com/haps/ For photos of the new daughter board, please visit: http://www.hardi.com/haps/images/ For more information about HARDI Electronics AB, please visit the company's website at http://www.hardi.com. |
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