BusinessWire
October 4, 2005

HARDI Electronics Unveils Industry's Most Advanced ASIC Prototyping Platform at the ARM Developers' Conference

The company’s third generation HAPS-34 FPGA platform motherboard uses Virtex-4 to offer increased performance at a lower price

Santa Clara, CA -- OCTOBER 4, 2005 – HARDI Electronics Inc., the leader in platform-based ASIC prototyping, announced today at the ARM Developer’s Conference the availability of a new series of motherboards with unmatched performance and capacity. Based on the largest Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGAs, the HAPS-34 helps both ASIC and ASSP designers to verify their designs quickly and accurately by leveraging the best-in-class I/O connectivity and best-in-class flexibility of the HAPS family of motherboards and daughter boards.

While competitive fixed-configuration ASIC prototyping products offer hundreds of user configurable I/Os, the HAPS-34 platform motherboard offers designers nearly 3,000 user-configurable I/Os. The HAPS motherboards also offer the industry’s only modular system with expandable capacity. Each motherboard can handle designs from 3-6 million ASIC gates. The boards can be stacked like Legos™ to increase capacity to any size ASIC. No other system on the market today has that level of flexibility.

“We are very pleased to introduce the first of our 3 rd generation HAPS motherboards, and to once again provide more ASIC prototyping functionality at a lower cost,” said Lars-Eric Lundgren, HARDI CEO. “Our worldwide customer base is constantly demanding more capacity and higher performance. HAPS-34 is the most advanced high capacity FPGA board ever built. I am proud to announce that our design team finished the first board in the HAPS-30 family just 9 months after we released the previous HAPS-20 family. To me, HAPS-34 is a work of art.”

HAPS addresses critical issues regarding prototyping board design such as cross-talk, signal integrity, impedance matching, connectivity problems, gate capacity and system speed. The HAPS-34 board can be used as a stand-alone device to prototype ASIC designs up to six million ASIC gates. Connecting two or more HAPS-34 boards together can further increase capacity to virtually any size. In addition, the HAPS-30 family conforms to the HapsTrak Standard, which guarantees compatibility with previous and future generations of HAPS motherboards and daughter boards, including user developed daughter boards.

HAPS-34 uses four Xilinx Virtex-4 XC4VLX100/160/200 devices in the largest pin count package, offering 3,000 user I/Os and a signaling rate of 1Gbps (LVDS) or 600Mbps (single ended). The HAPS-34 has 9 I/O-voltage regions on board. The voltage regions can be individually set to 3.3V, 2.5V, 1.8V or 1.5V. All power is generated from a single 5V power source. HAPS-34 also has 20 global low skew clock signals driven from a variety of sources.

“The HAPS-34 leverages our own high level digital design expertise, and the experience gained from developing 2 previous generations of ASIC prototyping platforms and from meeting the needs of our worldwide customers, both large and small,” stated Jonas Nilsson, HARDI Technical Manager. “Every single wire on the 20-layer PCB is carefully routed and verified for maximum performance and optimal signal integrity. Once again we are pleased to offer the best I/O connectivity, best flexibility, and highest performance available on the market.”

“For in-house prototyping teams the HAPS-34 system provides a reliable, well-documented, highly flexible building block,” commented John Hoekstra, HARDI North American Sales Manager. “With the ease of our modular, expandable capacity, prototyping teams can better leverage their expertise making their ASIC HW/SW verification process more robust."

HAPS Leverages Off-The-Shelf Software

HAPS customers get to verification faster by using off-the-shelf software for synthesis, partitioning and debugging - including Synplicity’s Certify which is a complete tool for ASIC prototyping. For Certify, the design flow is fully supported and carefully tested. A complete new set of Certify HAPS partitioning board files are available. For debugging, any of Synplicity's Identify, Temento's DiaLite or Xilinx ChipScope can be used.

For a complete description of features, the HAPS-34 datasheet can be downloaded at:

http://www.hardi.com/haps/literature/data_sheets/haps-34-ds.pdf

For photos of the new motherboard, please visit: http://www.hardi.com/haps/images/

Pricing and Availability

The HAPS-34 board will be available for delivery to customers in December with pricing starting at $48,000 USD.

For sales offices and a list of distributors worldwide, please visit: http://www.hardi.com/contact.htm.

About the HAPS Prototyping System

HAPS (HARDI ASIC Prototyping System) is the first modular FPGA board system providing high speed, high capacity, real-time debugging and full ASIC functionality for ASIC prototyping designers. The system is composed of multi-FPGA motherboards and standard or user developed daughter boards. To accommodate very large designs, designers can connect several mother­boards in many different ways. HAPS gives designers virtually the same functionality and performance as the ASIC.

About HARDI Electronics Inc

Founded in 1987, HARDI Electronics is a pioneer in the field of structured HDL-design. The company’s knowledge and experience ranges from SoC design using full custom ASICs to a wide variety of designs with programmable logic. HARDI introduced its first ASIC prototyping product in 2000 and today has many successful installations in North America, Europe and Asia. The privately held company is headquartered in Sweden and was incorporated in the USA in 2005. For more information, please visit the company’s website at http://www.hardi.com.

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