Not all aspects of electronic-system-level (ESL) design have
proved as worthy as others. Yet the virtual platform has
seen some of the broadest adoption among ESL technologies.
These fully functional software models of complete systems
have been in use for several years for the acceleration of
system development and hardware/software co-verification.
Since its May 2006 acquisition of Virtio, Synopsys has worked
to transform that company's virtual-platform offerings from their
service-oriented, one-off origins into a critical mass of broadly
applicable library components. The result is the addition of a system-
level library to the DesignWare IP portfolio (see the figure).
The initial library consists of over 50 transaction-level models
(TLMs) written in SystemC. It's important to note that the
models are tool-independent. That means they will run on any
IEEE-1666-compliant SystemC simulator.
The library includes many of the core functional blocks that
go into creating a virtual platform: board-level components, bus
interconnects and peripherals, debug interfaces, virtual I/O,
connectivity models, and user-interface emulation. It also
boasts a number of ARM processor cores, system-level Design-
Ware cores for standard bus protocols, and a full complement
of AMBA components.
Able to run at up to 50 MIPS, the virtual platforms constructed
with these models will offer fast simulation runtimes. They
also offer binary compatibility so they can run with unmodified
software. All have been verified against real-world software
drivers. Preconstructed platforms are available as well, including
a multimedia-player demo, a processor integration platform,
an AMBA reference platform, and a generic test platform.
The library is available now. Users pay only the runtime
license fee for the highest-valued model in their platform while
the rest execute at no charge.
Synopsys
www.synopsys.com
