Synopsys and First Silicon Solutions (FS2), a division of MIPS Technologies, announced the availability of the Sitka evaluation and development platform for Synopsys' DesignWare PCI Express (PCIe) IP. The Sitka board, the result of collaboration between the two companies, functions as a standard PCIe add-in card with support for up to eight PCIe lanes (each lane is a 2.5 Gbps communication channel). With this new platform, designers can test and debug their system-on-chip (SoC) designs using the DesignWare PCIe IP while performing interoperability testing between their SoC design and a PCIe PHY. Designers using the board to prototype With the board, designers can prototype large designs by synthesizing their SoC into two large on-board Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGAs. These two FPGAs are interconnected through 272 I/O pins and can be configured for operating at up to 1 Gbps point-to-point interconnect, providing high throughput data transfers or sets of unidirectional channels.

The FPGAs are configured via the on-board ROM. The ROM can hold multiple FPGA configurations allowing the designer to test design variations and switch between different PHYs and the Xilinx Rocket I/O. Synopsys has used the Sitka board for compliance testing of the combined DesignWare PCI Express digital cores and DesignWare PCI Express PHY at the PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) Compliance Workshops. For design development and prototyping, the Sitka board provides multiple options for the PHY interface. For initial prototyping, designers can use the built-in Xilinx Rocket I/O SERDES connected directly to the Sitka PCIe interface. For more extensive PCIe and PHY compatibility testing with their designs, designers can use a PCIe PIPE-compliant PHY and connect through the standard PIPE-C-compliant expansion connector. For DesignWare PCIe digital IP evaluations, Synopsys provides an FPGA configuration that allows the Sitka board to be used as a PCI Express-based 10/100 Ethernet adapter. The Sitka development and evaluation board is available now through FS2.