Andes teams on FPGA prototyping for RISC-V development

Andes Technology has partnered with S2C to collaborate on the development of an FPGA-based prototyping system tailored for its latest RISC-V cores with extensions. This strategic alliance leverages S2C’s cutting-edge Prodigy S8-100 FPGA prototyping platform, which is built on the foundation of the AMD Versal Premium VP1902 adaptive SoC. The platform boasts an impressive capacity of up to 100 million logic gates within a single FPGA, providing a robust environment for testing the newest RISC-V cores integrated with extensions enabled by Andes’ Automated Custom Extension (ACE) framework, as well as additional IP blocks.

One of the key challenges in FPGA prototyping is the potential for capacity constraints, which can limit the ability of SoC developers to seamlessly integrate multiple RISC-V cores alongside essential subsystems such as Network-on-Chip (NoC), DDR, PCIe® controllers, and more. To address this issue, the Prodigy S8-100 family offers larger configurations featuring two or four VP1902 adaptive SoCs, effectively scaling the capacity up to a remarkable 400 million logic gates per system. This expanded capacity facilitates comprehensive SoC validation in hardware, leading to significant reductions in development cycles, enhanced performance modeling, and accelerated software development even before the production silicon is available.

Moreover, the Prodigy S8-100 platform from S2C supports an extensive library of nearly 100 daughter cards designed to cater to a wide range of applications, including networking, storage, multimedia, and generic IOs. This diverse array of daughter cards enables efficient interface modeling and simulation without compromising FPGA logic resources, thereby enhancing the overall prototyping experience for developers working on RISC-V-based designs.

Ying J Chen, Vice President of S2C, expressed enthusiasm about the collaboration with Andes, highlighting the significant benefits it brings to the RISC-V community. He emphasized that the Prodigy S8-100 platform is uniquely positioned to address the evolving complexity of RISC-V-based designs, empowering developers to validate their innovations early on and accelerate their time-to-market with confidence. Similarly, Emerson Hsiao, President of Andes Technology US, underscored the advantages that partnering with S2C offers to customers, particularly in terms of robust, large-capacity FPGA-based prototyping. This collaboration enables customers to validate their customizations early in the development process, ultimately expediting the time-to-market for Andes-based RISC-V SoCs.