Prototypical: The Emergence of FPGA-Based Prototyping for SoC Design Paperback – May 21, 2016

The Semiwiki Team has done a good job covering the commercial history and motivations for FPGA-based prototypes and I think engineering managers who are not familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of FPGAs will benefit from the topics covered. The book does a decent job of explaining why emulation is distinct from a prototyping. I would have made a stronger point that emulators tend to abstract or virtualize I/O where prototypes integrate analog PHYs in order to do compliance testing and validation not possible with a VIP or other model. It was interesting to see the various PCB and interconnect architectures that have been used over the years. In my experience talking to prototype developers, the architecture, rightly or wrongly, is where they tend to focus anyway. Cables? Dedicated traces? Single or bank-oriented connector schemes? Stacked? Tiled? Since I/O management tends to be the factor that most influences performance - that's the aspect that is examined first. It would have been interesting for the book to compare/contrast the interconnect schemes available. And because partitioning and pin-multiplexing automation have such a big influence on productivity and system performance some guidelines on what designers should be reviewing/benchmarking about commercial system software tools would have been helpful.I found the S2C authored Field Guide to be largely a rehash of the company's website. I agree that commercial systems will need more enterprise IT features to support distributed teams, resource allocation, and to protect modern 16/20nm FPGAs from static discharge and poor handling practices. The whole question of what the best vehicle for IoT product prototyping I think is not yet resolved. There are so many more affordable approaches to integrate sensors with well established embedded controllers that I think future platforms will look very different or rely on Arduino-scale PCB systems. It's the customization/integration of application processors and GPU that drove the current wave of commercial systems that incorporate dozens of devices. An IoT platform of the future may need to provide not just the edge sensor array but networking infrastructure (5G, SIGFOX, etc.) and an analytics backend as well.While the example technologies are a bit dated now, the Synopsys/Xilinx FPGA-Based Prototyping Methodology Manual (FPMM) (Amos, Lesea, and Richter) still provides the most practical advice regardless if your team decides to build, buy, or both.