Virtualized Systems Development (VSD) enables "impossible" approaches to the development of electronic systems. The benefits extend across nearly every phase of product life cycle " all the way from definition, through development and finally deployment.
With VSD, a hands-on investigation of candidate system designs is possible, hardware and software teams can collaborate in new ways from the outset of a project, bugs can be found more quickly than ever, system integration can start much earlier, and customer support and training programs are more effective and easily delivered.
Why adopt VSD?
In just a few years, electronic systems have become exponentially more complex. Now, even comparatively simple designs include multiple processors, a mixture of CPU types, DSPs, ASICs, FPGAs and other devices. Complementing this diverse combination of hardware, today's systems employ a variety of operating systems and application stacks that until recently would not have been combined within a single product or solution.
Unfortunately however, as these systems have grown in complexity, the development tools and processes that were refined when single processors and basic client/server architectures were the rule, have not kept pace.
As a result, today's system developers are challenged to find new ways to define system architectures, to develop and integrate millions of lines of code, and to deploy such complex systems. They must do this in ways that reduce both risk and schedule while simultaneously resulting in a product that is high quality, easy to support and maintain.
The introduction of VSD into the work flow of an electronic project can benefit everyone involved in product definition, development and deployment. These benefits are summarized in Table 1(PDF) according to the position type and role.
What makes a virtual platform so powerful?
"Virtual platforms" are best described as functional models of physical hardware. They are used as the target for software development. A virtual platform can represent a basic board with a processor and memory, or a complete system made up of network-connected boards, chassis and racks.
The accuracy and fidelity of the model is such that the target software is unable to distinguish the virtual platform from physical hardware; it runs the same binaries and behaves exactly like physical hardware.
When these high fidelity virtual platforms are combined with a feature-rich simulation environment, developers can define, develop, deploy and integrate target-specific firmware, operating system kernel and device drivers, and application and communication stacks even while the hardware design and production progresses in parallel.
The use of virtual platforms provides many benefits to the product life cycle resulting from new techniques that become available to developers.
Virtual System Flexibility. A virtual platform will evolve incrementally, aiding software developers all the way from the model's origins as a basic platform, to the final full-system model. It is important for developers to remember that a complete model of the system is no more important to specific software development tasks than a CD player is required to check the brakes on your car.
Often, devices such as specific IO, ASICs, or a specific memory implementation can be simply omitted, stubbed out, or replaced by off-the-shelf models that provide similar functionality.
Executable Specifications. With VSD, hardware and software teams are able to experiment with new system architectures by creating and networking together several virtual platforms. This virtual system can then be used to run real software loads for the purpose of prototyping and design concept testing during the architecture or systems definition phase of a project.
Simplified Build Environments. Because the virtual platform runs the same software binaries that will be run by the physical system, there is no need for a special cross compiling, simulation or development builds. This aspect of VSD can significantly reduce the number of code build variants for a project, reducing maintenance costs and the risk of errors from inconsistent builds.
Re-usable Technology Assets. Today, even the smallest consumer devices are comprised of a diverse combination of processor cores and devices. Support for this level of complexity requires that the underlying simulation infrastructure allow building-block model construction. These building blocks can be re-used, so with VSD, every individual simulation component and platform model (processor cores, devices, custom ASICs, application-specific FPGAs, board or netwok models) becomes a reusable company asset.
