This week at the Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) in San Jose, Cadence rolled out the System Development Suite and one of the products in that suite is the Cadence Virtual System Platform, which you can use to get high-level system software up and running long before there’s any hardware to do it. The problem with simulations is that they’re often too slow to be of much use. Just getting a large OS like Linux booted can take a long time. Not on the Virtual System Platform.
Cadence Product Marketing Director Steve Brown helped me capture this video in the Cadence booth at ESC. It shows the ARM-based Smartphone virtual prototype running on the Virtual System Platform, which is running on a notebook PC. The virtual prototype is running SystemC models of key components in the Smartphone including real drivers. The Smartphone’s screen appears on the left and the simulated keyboard and control buttons are on the right. The simulation in this video took 90 seconds to boot to the point where it was running the Android SDK with the Linux OS and a Web browser.
One SystemC model is running the Ethernet connection so the browsing you see in this video is occurring in real time. Naturally, I had Steve Brown navigate the browser to the EDA360 Insider blog to look at the latest news, so the video is amusingly recursive.
More info on the Cadence Virtual System Platform:
Welcome to the Cadence Virtual System Platform by Jason Andrews
System Development Suite Is Key Draw at Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) by Richard Goering
Building Open Virtual Platforms — Bridging the Gap of Model Availability by Steven Brown
Cadence System Development Suite – The Story is the Continuum by Richard Goering
The Challenge of System Integration and Bring-Up by Ran Avinun
