Working together they have been able to significantly enhance FPGA prototyping capabilities for developers of advanced System-on-Chip (SoC) devices by leveraging S2C’s Prodigy S8-100 FPGA prototyping platform, based on the AMD Versal Premium VP1902 adaptive SoC.
The companies have significantly improved the capacity and flexibility for modelling, prototyping, and software development using Andes’ RISC-V cores.
FPGA prototyping has tended to face capacity limitations, restricting SoC developers’ ability to integrate multiple RISC-V cores along with subsystems like Network-on-Chip (NoC), DDR, and PCIe controllers, for example. The Prodigy S8-100 platform addresses these challenges by offering a single FPGA version with up to 100 million logic gates – providing ample capacity for Andes’ most advanced RISC-V processors, including the customers’ differentiating extensions enabled by the Andes’ Automated Custom Extension (ACE) framework, and additional IPs.
The Prodigy S8-100 family also includes larger configurations with two or even four VP1902 adaptive SoCs, scaling capacity up to 400 million logic gates per system. This substantial increase in logic capacity enables full SoC validation in hardware, significantly reducing development cycles, as well as optimising performance modelling and accelerating software development before production silicon becomes available.
Moreover, the platform supports S2C’s extensive library of nearly 100 daughter cards to support applications ranging from networking, storage, and multimedia to generic IOs facilitating efficient interface modelling and simulation without sacrificing FPGA logic resources.
“The collaboration between S2C and Andes marks a significant step forward for the RISC-V community, offering advanced SoC developers a powerful and cost-effective FPGA-based prototyping solution,” said Ying J Chen, Vice President of S2C. “Our Prodigy S8-100 platform uniquely addresses the evolving complexity of RISC-V-based designs, helping developers validate their innovations early and confidently accelerate time-to-market.”
Emerson Hsiao, President of Andes Technology USA, added, “Andes continues to drive innovation in high-performance RISC-V cores tailored to AI, automotive, and high-performance computing, and many of our customers further differentiate by adding their own extensions with our ACE framework. Partnering with S2C provides our customers with the critical advantage of robust, large-capacity FPGA-based prototyping, allowing them to prove-out their customisations early, ultimately accelerating their time-to-market with Andes-based RISC-V SoCs.”
