S2C Makes Major Enhancements to its TAI Player Pro FPGA Prototype Design and Debug Software

Enables Simultaneous Multiple Altera or Xilinx FPGA Debug and Adds New Runtime Features

San Jose, CA – March 27, 2012 – S2C announced today that it has made significant new enhancements to its TAI Player Pro FPGA-based prototype design and debug software. TAI Player Pro 4.1 major enhancements enable the simultaneous multiple Altera or Xilinx FPGA debug and the addition of new runtime features including constant measurement of voltage and current plus the real time measurement of clock frequencies.

TAI Player Pro serves uniform front-end to Altera, Xilinx or other 3rd party FPGA synthesis, place and route and debug software. With TAI Player Pro, the user designs and debugs the FPGA-based prototype in a common environment and can seamlessly move between the underlying Altera, Xilinx or 3rd party tools. More details can be found on the S2C website.

Mon-Ren Chene, S2C’s Chairman and CTO said: “our vision when we founded S2C was to provide a complete FPGA prototyping environment including both hardware and software in order to create an efficient and productive FPGA-based prototyping design and debug environment. We continue to evolve TAI Player Pro in response to customer feedback and our applications engineering experience.”

Multiple FPGA Debug

One of the limitations of commercial FPGA debug tools is that they can only debug results from .a single FPGA. This is very inconvenient with larger designs that often require multiple FPGAs. TAI Player Pro 4.1, in conjunction with S2C’s Verification Module Technology (patent pending), now supports the simultaneous debug of up to 4 Altera or Xilinx FPGAs. One of the unique features of this capability is that the original RTL names are preserved, removing the confusion of machine generated signal names.

New TAI Player Pro Runtime Features

The full TAI Player Pro software suite is sold on an annual subscription basis. The TAI Player Pro Runtime suite is supplied for free with the purchase of every TAI Logic Module. New capabilities have been added to this free suite with the release of TAI Player Pro 4.1. These new features include:

1. Assign I/O in the GUI - Instead of going through datasheets and manually creating I/O assignment files for the FPGAs, TAI Player Pro runtime software now includes S2C’s popular FPGA I/O assignment tool.
2. Monitor Voltages and Currents - TAI Player Pro runtime now can access to several key voltage and current levels on TAI Logic Module. Although the TAI Logic Modules are designed to automatically shut down the power when there is an event of over-voltage, over-current; the user will find this tool helpful to understand what may be the cause before such power shut down occurs.
3. Measure On-Board Clock Frequencies - TAI Player Pro sets up the on-board clock measurement hardware to measure the TAI Logic Module global clock frequencies with just a few mouse clicks. The tool can quickly validate if the clock sources are set correctly and eliminates the possibilities that the design may not be working correctly due to clock sources.