Software & Tools

Evaluation Systems

ARCangel™ Prototyping Tool

It is vital in most SoC development projects to verify hardware and start writing application software at the earliest possible stage. Simulation models play a major role, and these tools are constantly increasing in power and capability. However, there is often no substitute for a real chip running on a board in real time. This is especially true if the system requires a large amount of software to run or there is a real-time dependency in the system design, such as in mobile video systems. The newest model ARC® ARCangel 4 prototyping tool is the solution for these requirements. It is a powerful development and prototyping system, which allows engineers to optimize and debug both hardware and software before availability of actual silicon. ARCangel 4 accelerates the development cycle and reduces overall project costs.

Based on a large Xilinx™ Virtex-4 FPGA, ARCangel 4 is able to support many different configurations of ARC processors. During the chip design stage, it allows designers to test their processor configurations for hardware design problems and profile the system performance with multimedia or other application software. This provides valuable feedback that gives the designer the opportunity to optimize the system design to improve performance. Once an ARC processor design is complete, the ARCangel 4 system can be used as a software prototyping platform that supports real-time peripheral interaction, allowing engineers to develop and profile the application software before the silicon is available. The ARCangel 4 prototyping tool is compatible with all other ARC development tools.

The ARCangel 4's FPGA is the XC4VLX200, with 89,088 slices (four in every CLB) and 6 Mbits of block RAM giving plenty of capacity for the evaluation of large ARC processor configurations, custom instructions, and additional IP. The ARCangel 4 system supports numerous peripheral interfaces and allows developers to add expansion cards for custom peripherals and devices.

Engineers configure an ARC processor to meet the precise needs of their application using the ARChitect® tool. ARChitect produces an FPGA build file for downloading to the ARCangel 4. Using these powerful tools, it is possible for developers to configure the processor, build an ARCangel 4 configuration and begin testing hardware and software within a single day.

The Virtex-4 FPGA offers the capacity to prototype all configurations of the ARC processor, including media and video DSP builds. Typical ARC 700 family processor cores utilize less than 20% percent of the logic resources in FPGA, leaving plenty of remaining logic gates for DSP functions, peripheral logic, custom instructions, coprocessor modules, application specific interfaces and even additional processor cores.

The ARCangel 4 prototyping tool can run application software on an ARC processor at speeds up to 100 MHz, making it faster than any processor simulator and enabling real-time interaction with external devices.