The 59th Design Automation Conference returned to San Francisco’s Moscone Center this year to notch almost six decades of week-long immersion in EDA technology and market trends, combining keynote presentations by industry luminaries with the “DAC Engineering Track” technical presentations and the EDA tool-provider exhibits for in-person exchanges of EDA user-needs and the latest EDA solutions. Attendance by exhibitors, and EDA tool end-users alike, was noticeably improved from last year’s conference but still below pre-COVID levels. The Moscone Center neighborhood provided a less than inviting convention venue as San Francisco recovers from COVID’s decimation of the convention-generated commerce around the Center marred by heavily littered streets, a very noticeable presence of “street people”, and the closure of many name-brand businesses that are normally sustained by the “collateral business” generated by convention attendees.
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Despite the lower DAC attendance, S2C saw a marked improvement in the quantity and quality of visitors to the S2C booth. S2C highlighted its latest hardware and software and provided interactive demonstrations of its Prodigy MDM Pro multi-FPGA debug tools and its Prodigy ProtoBridge high-throughput channel for the transfer of large amounts of transaction-level data between the FPGA prototype and a host computer – both demonstrations running on S2C’s Quad Logic System prototyping hardware featuring Intel’s massive Stratix GX 10M FPGAs.
S2C took the opportunity at DAC to roll out its newest version of its prototyping software Prodigy Player Pro-7. The new software suite includes Player Pro-RunTime, for prototype platform control and hardware test; Player Pro-CompileTime, with enhanced automation of multi-FPGA partitioning and pre/post-partition timing analysis; and Player Pro-DebugTime, for multi-FPGA debug probing and trace viewing with S2C’s class-leading MDM Pro debug tools.
With an emphasis on large-scale SoC design prototyping, Player Pro-7 offers enhanced support for multi-FPGA implementations
S2C displayed a number of its latest prototyping products in its DAC booth this year, including the Prodigy Logic System 10M based on the industry’s largest FPGA, Intel’s Stratix 10 GX 10M. Also on display were S2C’s Xilinx-based prototyping hardware, the Prodigy S7-19P Logic System, and the S7-9P Logic System, both getting their fair share of DAC attendee attention.