The Zynq Virtual Platform: Not Just for Pre-Silicon

By _Cadence Blog

February 9, 2012

One of the biggest misconceptions about Virtual Platforms is that they are only useful for pre-silicon software development, and once a chip and board is ready they are quickly discarded. Even after boards are available, Virtual Platforms are valuable for software development.

Last week I was talking with an engineer at a company that is working on a new system design and has started Virtual Platform development. He told me that one of the software engineers was working on a demo to showcase their new operating system running on the target CPU. The software engineer had a reference board with the CPU and enough hardware to run the OS and show a demo application, but after a number of days struggling to get the software working to his satisfaction, they decided to try the SystemC Virtual Platform to see if any more information could be obtained. In less than 30 minutes the problem was found and fixed. The success was due to the visibility provided by the Virtual Platform, visibility that is not possible with a board. The lesson learned was that after hardware registers are programmed, it's very difficult to see what the system is doing.

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