Chapters

About this book: This book is a deep dive into a key methodology enabling concurrent hardware/software development by decoupling the dependency of software development from hardware availability, known as virtual prototyping. The ability to start software development much earlier in the design cycle drives a true "shift-left" of the entire product development schedule

Chapter 1: We start by reviewing software development complexity resulting from the race towards "smarter" products, including the multicore challenge, the tight balance between power and performance requirements and the growing concern about security.

Chapter 2: We introduce virtual prototyping as the engine behind "shift left" and explain the main benefits of this methodology to help software developers cope with tight software schedules and complex software bring up, test and debug challenges. Case studies by TI, Siemens and Altera.

Chapter 3: We illustrate the advantages of using a combined solution, consisting of a virtual prototype and debug and analysis tools for software bring up tasks like boot sequence development, operating system porting and driver development. Case studies by Fujitsu, TI and Altera.

Chapter 4: We describe how the automotive industry is becoming more software centric and dealing with functional safety questions. Virtual prototypes are helping by providing key capabilities to enable extensive software testing. Case studies by Bosch, Hitachi and General Motors.

Chapter 5: We examine how virtual prototypes enable faster software development across the entire electronic supply chain. Case studies by Altera, ARM, Linaro and Renesas.

Chapter 6: For specific software bring up and validation use cases and for software driven verification it can be useful to combine virtual prototypes with hardware-based prototyping and verification solutions like FPGA-based prototypes and emulators. Case study by Ricoh.

Chapter 7: Semiconductor Engineering Editor in Chief Ed Sperling provides his view on the electronics industry and discusses the case for virtual prototyping with industry experts from Microsoft, Lauterbach and Synopsys.