A rapid silicon processing arrangement significantly decreases the time from initial design to market introduction. Consistent with one embodiment of the present invention, rapid silicon processing arrangement uses a deconfigurable and extendible reference-chip development platform that includes a programmable device such as an electronically reconfigurable gate array and an off-platform bus for communicating with external devices. The reference-chip development platform can be deconfigured by deselecting communicative activity by one or more of functional block macros. The external devices can be used with the reference-chip development platform to test a hardware representation of the synthesized of the functional block macros in the programmable device within the reference-chip development platform as extended by the off-platform bus. The approach significantly decreases the development time, from initial design to market introduction.