ProDesign Announces PCI Express Kit for High-Speed ASIC Prototyping System; New PCI Express Kit Accelerates ASIC Design Verification for PCI Express Development Program

Business Wire, April 10, 2006

MUNICH, Germany & SAN JOSE, Calif. -- ProDesign, leading supplier of high-speed ASIC and SoC verification platforms, today announced the availability of the PCI Express Kit for its ASIC prototyping system.

The PCI Express kit consists of a PCI Express Rocket IO board and a PCI Express Interface Board. The board directly connects to the extension slots of the CHIPit Platinum Edition. It is assembled with a Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGA, a JTAG debug connector, a RS232 interface, and supports a 1-lane or 4-lane PCI Express interface. The board is easily integrated into the CHIPit system and connects to the CHIPit Platinum global signals and clock distribution network. In addition to the PCI Express Rocket IO extension board, the kit includes two PCI Express Interface Boards, which support four lanes (PCI Express x4) and one lane (PCI Express x1). A high-speed cable connects the interface board to the PCI Express Rocket IO extension board. Furthermore, the PCI Express Rocket IO board provides one regular extension board slot and a general purpose Rocket IO extension board slot to support other GBit interfaces like SATA, GBit Ethernet etc.

The PCI Express board can be used as a plug-in card or to plug a PCI Express add-in card in it, providing the user with a flexible PCI Express Kit that can be tailored to meet their specific needs.

"Complex PCI Express based ASIC designs typically require verification with a real PCI Express interface. For this reason, we developed the PCI Express kit for our flagship prototyping system, CHIPit Platinum Edition. This new feature is already successfully in use," said Gunnar Scholl, Director of Marketing at ProDesign.

"We are very proud that our engineering team was able to create a high-speed PCI Express Kit which solves many of our customers' critical verification challenges. With this new feature, CHIPit users can dramatically reduce verification time," stated Heiko Mauersberger, CTO of ProDesign.

About ProDesign

The privately held company has over 80 employees and various facilities in Germany, France and the U.S. The company's products and services include the CHIPit family of High-Speed ASIC Prototyping Systems to validate algorithm performance, verify hardware implementation, and assist in hardware/software co-development and co-verification to reduce the verification time dramatically. http://www.uchipit.com.