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1. SoC prototyping: an indispensable step
As advanced technologies such as AI and 5G progress, the vision of pervasive connectivity is gradually becoming reality, enabling new applications and higher demands on chip design. Although feature sizes continue to shrink, transistor counts keep growing rapidly, driving larger-scale SoC designs and increasing demand for EDA tools.
Tape-out is a necessary but high-risk stage in chip development. Small design mistakes can cause significant financial losses and missed market windows. Logic or functional errors account for roughly half of tape-out failures, and design errors represent about 50%–70% of functional defects. Verification therefore determines the success or failure of an SoC project. SoC verification is highly complex and can consume approximately 70% of total R&D time. To shorten development cycles, system software development and pre-tape-out verification must be performed in parallel, which highlights the advantages of prototype-based verification.
For large SoC designs, traditional software simulation often becomes a bottleneck due to insufficient speed. As a result, prototyping and hardware emulation have become the two mainstream verification approaches, with prototyping gaining prominence because of its high performance. Compared with software simulation, prototyping can be thousands to millions of times faster. Compared with hardware emulation, prototyping is often lower cost and faster, making it a scalable and cost-effective choice for verifying complex SoCs.
Prototyping is typically implemented using FPGA (field programmable gate array) because FPGAs can be configured to match the functionality of the target digital circuits and verify logic correctness. Historically engineers relied on manually built prototype platforms. That approach becomes hard to maintain and scale for multi-FPGA and highly complex designs. Manual partitioning, logic allocation, and inter-FPGA interface design are time-consuming and error-prone. For complex SoC projects, purely manual prototyping struggles to meet schedule and quality requirements, consuming large amounts of manpower and increasing the risk of delays and cost overruns. These challenges drove the development of commercial prototyping solutions.
2. Emergence of commercial prototyping tools
In 1992, Aptix introduced System Explorer, a commercial prototype verification system using FPGAs and a custom interconnect chip. In the following years, academic projects such as the University of Toronto's Transmogrifier-1, North Carolina State's AnyBoard, Stanford's Protozone, and UC Santa Cruz's BORG explored how to implement HDL chip designs on small prototype boards.
These early efforts explored multiple approaches to prototyping. Although not immediately ready for large-scale commercialization, Aptix's work inspired other suppliers and spurred broader industry interest. Aptix later disappeared in subsequent acquisition waves, but its methodological contributions remain historically significant.
In 2003, Lin Junxiong left Aptix and founded S2C. He established the company in San Jose and soon set up a headquarters and an R&D center in Shanghai. At that time China had limited EDA development, and S2C assembled EDA talent to address the large potential in the Chinese market. The company introduced IP Porter at DAC in 2005 and later released commercial Prodigy series products.
At the same time, other companies were exploring prototyping. Dini Group in the U.S. released the DN250k10 commercial FPGA prototyping board in 1998, based on six Xilinx XC4085 FPGAs, offering flexibility at a reasonable cost. Swedish company HARDI Electronics AB introduced the HAPS system based on Xilinx Virtex FPGAs in 2000. These early products still required substantial manual effort to assemble prototype environments.
3. Rapid growth driven by EDA competition
In 2008 Synopsys acquired Synplicity for $227 million, signaling a rapid expansion and intensified competition in the prototyping market. Synopsys spent nearly four years integrating technologies and released the HAPS-70 series, a more automated prototyping product. After this acquisition, prototyping accelerated toward mainstream adoption alongside software and hardware emulation.
Cadence also entered the field and focused on developing its own FPGA boards, with limited early success until it acquired Taray and its FPGA design technology in 2010. Taray pioneered routing-aware pin-assignment synthesis that optimized FPGA design together with the PCB layout, aiding prototype platform design. For a period Cadence collaborated with Dini Group on the Protium product. Dini Group was later acquired by Synopsys in December 2019. Cadence has since aimed to improve the integration between prototyping products and hardware emulation.
Siemens EDA, following its acquisition of Mentor Graphics in 2016, experienced a complex development path in prototyping. The company had licensed simulation technology from Aptix in the late 1990s, then went through challenges. To strengthen timing-driven and multi-FPGA partitioning capabilities, Siemens EDA acquired Auspy and France-based Flexras Technologies, the latter providing the Wasga automatic partitioning software. In June 2021 Siemens EDA acquired PRO DESIGN's proFPGA product line, further enhancing its prototyping offerings.
In the Chinese market, several smaller suppliers also began offering lower-cost solutions. Yake Hongyu, established in 2009, offered the VeriTiger prototyping product. Huashang Electronics launched the PHINE Design series in 2014 and has released multiple generations since. After 2020, amid a broader localization trend, new entrants such as Hejian Gongruan and Xinhua Zhang entered the prototyping market via acquisition and in-house development.
4. Major challenges and technical responses
Over more than three decades, prototyping technology has advanced significantly. Since Aptix's System Explorer, prototyping has provided chip design teams with greater flexibility and efficiency.
With the rise of tightly integrated hardware and software, prototyping faced new challenges and opportunities that reinforced its role in chip design. Major EDA vendors and specialist suppliers expanded the ecosystem through strategic acquisitions and technical innovation, making prototyping systems more capable and better suited to market growth.
Prototyping today requires specialized solutions to handle design partitioning, mapping, external interfaces and communication, debugging, and performance optimization. This specialization has raised the technical barrier for prototyping, leaving only a few EDA companies in leading positions; some firms have relied on acquisitions to build the necessary capabilities.
S2C introduced timing-driven RTL-level partitioning algorithms, built-in incremental compilation, and new hardware configurations supporting more FPGAs and higher-performance connectors to address these challenges. Through continuous technical iterations and service development, the company built stable supply capabilities and maintained competitiveness. S2C has accumulated about 20 years of product and market experience and is among the earliest companies engaged in prototyping research and sales in China. According to CSIA 2020 statistics, S2C's prototyping solutions held over 50% share in the Chinese market.
Thanks to these industry efforts, prototyping technology has matured, improving the efficiency and quality of modern chip design while reducing development cost. Advanced prototyping solutions allow design teams to respond more flexibly to market requirements and support ongoing industry development worldwide.
