Toward an intuitive system design environment

Sandeep Dutta & Ramine Roane
embedded.com (May 3, 2016)

Advanced systems are becoming increasingly complex, forcing manufacturers to spend correspondingly greater time developing and debugging each device -- typically with little visibility into system-level interactions of multiple components. Visual System Integrator (VSI) is a unique tool that facilitates system design and integration by enabling designers to graphically describe their heterogeneous systems completely and accurately. Based on this description, the tool automatically generates drivers required for communication across standard interfaces. Consequently, architects and engineers can focus on their key differentiators rather than on designing and debugging standard data transport and device drivers. VSI is flexible enough to allow the user to extend or replace the implementation of any of the runtime components. In this article we explore the different aspects of this novel development environment, including hardware platform description, application development, as well as built-in runtime and trace facility.

Describing the Hardware Platform

The VSI Platform description environment accelerates platform creation and maintenance by providing an intuitive visual environment for the task, enabling system architects and even software developers to rapidly create and iterate on complex hardware platforms. Figure 1 below illustrates a platform composed of and FPGA board connected to an external host. Note that the user specifies which interfaces to elevate at system level.

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