It doesn’t matter how much you think you know ... there's always something new to discover. For example, I was just introduced to a rather interesting rapid SoC (System on Chip) prototyping technology provider – a company called S2C (www.s2cinc.com)...

I was chatting with EDA Veteran Steve Pollock earlier on today as I pen these words. We were reminiscing about the way we used to do designs way back in the mists of time. It was a bit like the old Monty Python Four Yorkshiremen skit – you remember the one where four old guys try to outdo each other with regard to how difficult things were in their younger years (you can see this skit on YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo).

This is particularly relevant to me because I'm from Yorkshire ("Yorkshire born and bred," as they say over there), and I remember folks talking just like this (grin).

In the case of the conversation between Steve and myself, we were talking about hand-designing chips at the gate-level and transistor-level in the form of pencil-drawn schematics; performing timing analysis by hand; trying to decode the results from analog simulation where said results were printed out on reams of zig-zag computer paper; and .. the list goes on.  

Eventually we started chatting about how things have changed – how easy designers have things today (of course) – and just how wonderful the new tools are. Then Steve mentioned that he had just assumed the role of VP of Marketing and Business Development for a company called S2C Inc., which specializes in supplying rapid prototyping tools for SoC designs.

To be honest I'd never heard of S2C before, but from what Steve told me they sound rather interesting, and I now want to learn a lot more. It seems that they've developed a series of FPGA-based SoC prototyping boards. Their latest offering, which is based on 40nm Altera Stratix IV FPGAs, can provide the equivalent of 30 million ASIC gates.

Steve says that the benefits of using S2C technology are the ability to rapidly architect and debug a SoC prototype using a large library of Prototype Ready IP.  Once the design is stable, the S2C prototype board can be used as a high-performance software development platform. Furthermore, S2C can provide design services from prototype development to delivering a production IC.

S2C's initial focus was on the Far East market – China in particular, with offices in Beijing and Shenzhen. More recently they've signed distribution agreements in Taiwan, Korea, India, and Japan, and now they've started to focus on establishing S2C in the US market.

This all sounds jolly interesting, and I'm very much looking forward to learning more. Maybe I'll even get to visit them in China sometime, which would be very cool because it's been quite a while since I was over there and I still have a huge list of things I want to see and do...