VIP: A Flexible Virtual Integrated Platform for EVM Emulation

EVM (evaluation module) has become an important and useful tool both in developing embedded systems and in teaching course modules which cover embedded system programming. However, an EVM with the configuration suitable for the diversity in embedded system programming is usually quite expensive such that setting up a laboratory for students to practice programming embedded system sums a large amount of funding. This paper presents the development of VIP (virtual integrated platform) to provide flexibility in EVM emulation. VIP has notable features of flexibility in configuration, dynamic loading of device emulation modules, and visual device emulation. It integrates the emulation of configured devices at runtime to build an emulator of the target EVM. The development of VIP is composed of a framework to emulate a bus-structured platform as the base EVM and the device emulation modules connected to the bus, which are loaded at run time. It therefore has the advantages of not only its capability of flexible and extensible configuration and dynamically loading of device modules, but also the capability of catching up with the changes to new platforms or new devices by replacing device modules, in addition to being a low cost educational tool.