Industry Expert Blogs

Warning: Technical Content!

I read an online article this week which flagged an issue with FPGA-based prototyping, clock conversion. Clock conversion is one of the most important aspects to successful prototyping and this week’s blog is dedicated to sharing information enabling you to be successful. Specifically I will cover automated Gated Clock Conversion, GCC, as the user realizes the highest benefits. With automated gated clock conversion you don’t need to maintain a separate RTL code branch for prototyping, you use the golden RTL source. Clock conversion done right ensures the prototype runs at the highest performance functionally equivalent to the source. If you look at the data from the Channel Media survey that Synopsys had conducted you see that for large FPGA-based prototyping, clock conversion is a major challenge.