White Paper

Turbo-Charging Continuous Integration and Development Flows with Virtual Prototypes

As leading-edge semiconductors have evolved into programmable multi-core system-on-chip (SoC) devices, embedded software development has become a dominant factor in project cost and schedule. Virtual prototypes are widely used for writing and debugging embedded code so that the programmers do not have to wait for hardware prototypes. In recent years, the complexity of embedded software has grown tremendously, resulting in larger programming teams and the significant challenge of integrating their code together into working systems.

This white paper discusses using a combination of virtual prototypes to replace physical hardware and a continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) flow not only to “shift left” the initial project schedule but also to enable a faster and more efficient ongoing embedded software development flow with qualified releases and higher code quality.