Development of Arm based systems with Synopsys Virtual Prototyping: Anytime, Anywhere!

** Sharing this article from Kamal Desai, Product Marketing Manager at Synopsys

Around the world thousands of engineers have been asked to work from home. Temporarily gone are the days of global travel, and with it the ‘traditional’ development and global collaboration methodologies. One thing is for certain: the current ways of global development and collaboration will need to evolve. Hardware and software teams need an alternative way of collaborating, and to get their systems to market just as efficiently. Developing remotely can be a challenge in the age of social distancing. Yes, Zoom and other online meeting tools can handle the face-to-face collaboration aspects, but what about access to remote and sometimes scarce hardware and systems for development and test? Virtual prototyping enables replacing hardware with software equivalent models of the hardware; at any time, and from anywhere, keeping software teams productive in challenging environments. 

Virtual prototypes are fast, fully functional software models of complete systems that execute unmodified production code and provide unparalleled debug efficiency. Together with Arm, Synopsys has developed the industry’s most comprehensive suite of models to accelerate the development of today’s complex systems. Arm processors are being deployed in a wide range of markets including mobile, consumer, enterprise, and automotive. Ever increasing software content and shorter development windows call for tools to enable earlier software development. The Synopsys Virtualizer Development Kit (VDK) Family for Arm processors offers a wide range of models and software tools to span this entire application domain.  

VDKs are software development kits using virtual prototypes as the embedded target. The VDKs include multiprocessor software debug and analysis tools, reference software stacks and Armv7/Armv8 processor-based reference designs. They provide an out-of-the-box software development platform, and can be customized with the Virtualizer tool set to represent users' specific Armv7/Armv8 SoCs.  

Advantages of virtual prototyping 

In addition to providing ubiquitous access to software equivalent virtual prototypes of hardware, other advantages of virtual prototypes include: 

• Enabling software engineers to start development months before the hardware design is complete, allowing full system bring-up to occur within days of silicon availability.  
• Faster debug and analysis of complex software development and integration issues in a safe environment 
• Scalable deployment in regression increasing testing throughput 
• Improved communication and collaboration between semiconductor vendors and their customers  
• Overall reduced development costs and faster time-to-market  

Late or unavailable access to hardware is an all too common reason for delays, missing market windows, and failure in today’s embedded software projects. Virtual prototypes greatly reduce the risk of late or unavailable access to hardware imposed by today’s social distancing norms. Learn more about virtual prototyping using the following button and lookout for a demo virtual prototyping system coming to a cloud near you soon. Until then, stay safe. 

Find out more