Climbing to the top of the FPGA Summit
Posted by Dave Orecchio on Sun, Dec 14, 2008 @ 05:22 PM
Last week (Dec 9-11) the first annual FPGA Summit was held in San Jose, California. Several hundred attendees experienced the first FPGA focused technical conference with a positive response by all. The conference included hands-on tutorials, many technical tutorial sessions and expert sessions covering topics like design, verification and more.
GateRocket provided technical leadership during several tutorial sessions, starting with a session called "getting your FPGA up and running" organized by Steve Knapp of Prevailing Technology. Dave Orecchio presented on FPGA Verification, highlighting the available verification methodologies that are currently applied to ASIC design and reviewing the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches as applied to FPGA verification. It was clear to the audience that FPGAs are fundamentally different than ASICs and new methods are required for FPGAs, specifically Device Native verification approach described by GateRocket.
Later in the day, Dave Orecchio organized a deep technical session drilling into the details of FPGA Verification. The session included presenters from Mentor Graphics, Altera, Xilinx, Agilent Technologies and GateRocket's CTO Chris Schalick. The presentations covered each aspect of verification for FPGAs and all identified the hardware-in-the-loop verification offered by GateRocket as a key requirement for on-time completion of FPGA projects and effective verification. Chris Schalick reviewed many examples of FPGA bugs and highlighted the source of bugs and where in the process the bugs were found. In most cases the user was required to re-work their design for bugs found in the lab, the very costly issue that the GateRocket RocketDrive addresses. You can download the presentations here.
At the end of the day on Wednesday, Dave Orecchio (GateRocket) and Joe Rodriguez (Mentor Graphics) held court as the FPGA Verification experts. Many designers huddled around the duo and probed the many issues they faced during FPGA verification and debug. Dave and Joe addressed the queries providing the keys to success for high quality verification for the state of the art FPGAs.
On each of the conference days, GateRocket demonstrated the RocketDrive and RocketVision products with a very enthusiastic reception. The picture shows Chris Schalick demonstrating to several interested FPGA engineers.
It was clear that GateRocket has climbed to the top of the FPGA Summit!