Springbok: A Rapid-Prototyping System for Board-Level Designs
Scott Hauck, Gaetano Borriello, Carl W. Ebeling · 1994
Multi-chip, board-level designs form a large portion of today's digital system designs. Unfortunately, traditional methods for debugging these designs, such as wire wrap, prototype fabrication and software simulation, are inadequate. Wire-wrap is complex and error-prone, prototype fabrication is time-consuming and it is difficult to isolate errors, and simulation is too slow for full testing. Recent advances in FPGAbased systems offer hope for significant improvements in board-level prototyping. In this paper, we present Springbok, an integrated system for board-level prototyping that promises near-speed testing with the construction and modification simplicity of software simulation. It is comprised of an integrated software system for mapping designs to a flexible, extensible hardware implementation platform. This allows designs to take advantage of FPGA flexibility while using many of the complex chips that will implement the final design. 1. Introduction To develop today's comple...