Design Interface has supplied many ARM processor based designs - including several to ARM themselves. Another client company requiring massive and programmable number crunching performance in a small space has dominated its market with a multiprocessor StrongARM system developed by Design Interface. A couple of examples are shown below:
One use for FPGAs has been to emulate a proposed ASIC in order to develop and prove the design prior to tape-out.
A European company developing an ARM based product ordered this board design to allow them to verify their multiple sourced schematic / VHDL / Verilog design before committing to an ASIC. A discrete ARM processor is mounted on the mezzanine board in the top right corner, the AMBA bus and other signals are connected to the FPGAs. An additional benefit was being able to supply working systems to their software developers months before the ASIC design was finalised. The fully functional prototypes allowed new features to be evaluated simply by reloading the FPGAs, thereby enhancing the utility of the final ASIC implementation.
Up to eight 233 MHz SA110 StrongARM processor sites may be populated on this half size PCI card, allowing a range of price / performance options within a single design. Each heatsink conceals four SA110 StrongARM processors.