As the cost per gate of FPGAs declines, embedded and high performance systems designers are being presented with new opportunities for creating accelerated software applications using FPGA-based programmable hardware platforms. From a hardware perspective, these new platforms effectively bridge the gap between software programmable systems based on traditional microprocessors and application specific platforms based on custom hardware functions. From a software perspective, advances in design tools and methodology for FPGA-based platforms enable the rapid creation of hardware-accelerated algorithms.

Systems on Chip (SoCs) integrate increasingly complex hardware features with even more complex software applications, which makes validating SoCs a challenging task. FPGA-based prototyping has become an increasingly popular way of validating SoCs, for good reasons: FPGA devices have enough capacity to fit complex ASICs, and run fast enough to interact with real world interface systems(e.g., Ethernet, PCI).