Virtual prototyping increases productivity - A case study

With the advancement in technology, more and more functionality is being integrated into SoCs. A typical SoC contains one or more micro-controllers, several peripherals and embedded memories. In the software arena, there is a whole lot of embedded software that goes into products, built using these complex SoCs. In this era of consumer driven economy, all the product design groups are under a tremendous pressure to meet the aggressive time-to-market schedules and still deliver the right solution the first time. This creates a need for having a robust product flow, which enables different teams to work simultaneously and coherently. Following are some of the key activities in any product development flow. 1) System Engineering 2) Map customer requirements to design features. 3) Optimize design to meet the requirements in the best possible way. 4) Hardware design 5) Design, develop and integrate different Hardware (HW) or design modules/blocks 6) Develop reference models for validating different modules/blocks/sub-systems 7) Software development 8) Design, develop and integrate different Software (SW) modules 9) Develop reference models for validating these modules/sub-systems 10) System Validation 11) Build a system 12) Port the software onto the system 13) Validate the system with true system scenarios. 14) Customer Delivery. Traditionally, many of these development activities have always been mostly sequential in nature. This type of sequential flow cannot help in meeting the time-to-market requirements of today´s consumer products. Some of the most popular alternatives to this kind of sequential development flow include a) FPGA prototyping of the system b) Develop prototype using Instruction Set Simulators (ISS) c) Virtual System Prototyping (VSP). The first option lacks the required flexibility and need to have the complete micro-architecture defined before designing the prototype. Traditional ISS solutions are used for simulating processors with few or no perip- herals connected. ISS solutions are therefore used for verifying small portions of the embedded code and not directly suitable for true system simulations. VSP definitely addresses these issues. The concept of VSP is based on creating a software model of the entire hardware system including external components (e.g. base station model for checking the base band systems). This model can be used to explore and analyze different architectures. Once an optimal architecture has been chosen, the same model can be used as an executable specification. HW design teams can use the VSP as a golden reference model against which they can verify the functionality of different modules and/or subsystems in the design. SW teams can use VSP to start their development work, as soon as the architecture is defined and the corresponding VSP is available. As a part of this work, attempt has been made to highlight advantages and challenges of virtual prototyping with a case study.