Posted by Tom De Schutter on September 29, 2014
As highlighted in many of my blog posts, virtual prototyping has really established itself as the key methodology to shift left software development by decoupling the dependency of software development from hardware availability. The success of the “Better Software. Faster!” book illustrates the wide spread interest in the methodology.
The success of virtual prototypes has also led users to find more ways to leverage them across a wider range of use cases. For certain tasks, the combined strengths of virtual prototypes and other methodologies can help you achieve a 1 + 1 that is bigger than 2. Examples of these great synergies are virtual prototypes + automotive tools like Saber and Simulink, virtual prototypes + FPGA-based prototypes (called hybrid prototypes) and virtual prototypes + emulation (called hybrid emulation). In this blog we will focus on the use cases for hybrid emulation.
I see three main use cases where hybrid emulation can provide significant benefits to its users:
Users around the world have experienced significant value from the above three use cases. A major SoC company explained how they first used a VDK (virtual development kit) to bring-up, test and debug their application processor software, like the OS and then connected the VDK to their GPU mapped onto an emulator (Synopsys ZeBu) to enable GPU software bring-up. The accuracy of the emulator environment also enabled them to optimize the caches in the system and complete the software performance optimization. Eventually they were able to validate the hardware and software by mapping the entire SoC onto the emulator. This step-by-step effort enabled them to fully leverage the strengths of the different methodologies such as high simulation speed of a VDK to boot up the OS and cycle accuracy of the emulator to optimize and validate the hardware and software.
The value of this hybrid emulation methodology is further explained in an article from Tom Borgstrom: http://electronicdesign.com/eda/hybrid-emulation-accelerates-architecture-optimization-software-development-and-software-driven-.
I also invite you to attend our session at ARM TechCon on this topic: http://schedule.armtechcon.com/session/synopsys-turbocharge-your-verification-with-synopsys-hybrid-emulation
Gwyneth Sauceda, one of our ZeBu emulator experts and I will explain the value of hybrid emulation and dive deeper into the different applications and customer case studies.
See you at ARM TechCon on October 1 from 12pm-12:50pm in the Mission City Ballroom M1 at the Santa Clara convention center.
Or visit us at the Synopsys booth #600.
Patrick Sheridan
Patrick Sheridan is responsible for Synopsys' system-level solution for virtual prototyping. In addition to his responsibilities at Synopsys, from 2005 through 2011 he served as the Executive Director of the Open SystemC Initiative (now part of the Accellera Systems Initiative). Mr. Sheridan has 30 years of experience in the marketing and business development of high technology hardware and software products for Silicon Valley companies.
Malte Doerper
Malte Doerper is responsible for driving the software oriented virtual prototyping business at Synopsys. Today he is based in Mountain View, California. Malte also spent over 7 years in Tokyo, Japan, where he led the customer facing program management practice for the Synopsys system-level products. Malte has over 12 years’ experiences in all aspects of system-level design ranging from research, engineering, product management and business development. Malte joined Synopsys through the CoWare acquisition, before CoWare he worked as researcher at the Institute for Integrated Signal Processing Systems at the Aachen University of Technology, Germany.
Tom De Schutter
Tom De Schutter is responsible for driving the physical prototyping business at Synopsys. He joined Synopsys through the acquisition of CoWare where he was the product marketing manager for transaction-level models. Tom has over 10 years of experience in system-level design through different marketing and engineering roles. Before joining the marketing team he led the transaction-level modeling team at CoWare.