An Implementation of Rapid Prototyping Platform of Embedded Systems

This paper presents a flexible, board-level rapid prototype of embedded systems with FPGA. As the turnaround times prove to be key factors for consumer electronics industry, designers are under more and more pressure to reduce design cycles. Rapid prototyping and reconfigurable platforms will significantly diminish the development cycles and reduce costs. Previously, several approaches have been proposed, i.e. prefabricated SoC, embedded configurable logic on FPGA, or NIOS, yet with the drawbacks of high costs, the mastery of complicated VHDL programming, and unfaithful representation of hardware. This paper proposes a solution by adding an interconnection module between the minimal system and peripherals. As the central role of the module, FPGA can quickly redefine the pins and connections through programming. To show the platform's convenience and rapid prototyping ability, we developed two target systems on Intel and Samsung processors respectively, and also founded the software environment using this platform..