The growing complexity of today’s ICs and tight market schedules are driving a demand for more powerful solutions for design prototyping. Prototyping helps designers determine the feasibility of implementing a particular design given the various requirements. By using Olympus-SoC for rapid prototyping early in the design cycle, designers can catch issues with macro placement, missing constraints, RTL problems, and many other design problems. In this paper, we show how design prototyping with the Mentor Graphics Olympus-SoC physical implementation system improves predictability and facilitates design closure.