Springbok: A Rapid-Prototyping System for Board- Level Designs

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.