Frank Schirrmeister of Synopsys recently published a blog post called “Busting Virtual Platform Myths – Part 1: “Virtual Platforms are for application software only”. In it, he is refuting a claim by Eve that virtual platforms are for application-level software-development only, basically claiming that they are mostly for driver and OS development and citing some Synopsys-Virtio Innovator examples of such uses. In his view, most appication-software is being developed using host-compiled techniques. I want to add to this refutal by adding that application-software is surely a very important — and large — use case for virtual platforms.
Tag Archives: Synopsys
IP08 Panel on Virtual Platforms and Software
On Wednesday this week, I will take part of a panel discussion about virtual platforms and using them for software development, at the IP08 conference in Grenoble in France. We have a good crew, including Markus Willems from Synopsys, Peter Flake from ELDA, and Loic le Toumelin from TI (who I have not met before).
Schirrmeister has a nice observation on model-based development
Model-based architecture (MDA) or model-based development is an idea that to me comes from the automotive field. To, it means that you use some tool that is capable of modeling both a computer controller system and the environment being controlled to create a simulation world where computer control and environment meet and the characteristics of the controller can be ascertained quickly. The key is to not have to convert controller algorithms to concrete code, and not have to run concrete code on concrete hardware against physical prototypes to test the controllers. Today, this seems to be applied to many fields where you are creating control systems (automotive, aviation, robotics). The tools are math-based like MatLab and LabView, along with special programming environments based on UML and StateCharts.
What is interesting is that most of these tools are graphical in nature. And they do seem to work quite well, which is quite surprising given the otherwise poor record of graphical programming as opposed to text-based programming. There were a pile of graphical programming environments in the 1980′s, none of which amounted to much. What survived and prospered were the good old text-based languages like C, C++, Java, VisualBasic, etc. In practice, it seems like it is very hard to beat sequential text when it is time to actual get code working. More efficient programming seems to boil down to having to write less text and having text which is easier to write (for example, dynamic typing, rich libraries, garbage collection, and other modern language features that remove intellectual burdens from the programmer).
But graphics do seem to work for domain-specific cases (like control engineering or signal processing), especially for data-flow-style problems. And for abstract architecture work. So there has to be something to it… but what?
Cadence-Ran vs Synopsys-Frank over Low-Power and Virtual Things
Over the past few weeks there was a interesting exchange of blog posts, opinions, and ideas between Frank Schirrmeister of Synopsys and Ran Avinun of Cadence. It is about virtual platforms vs hardware emulation, and how to do low-power design “properly”. Quite an interesting exchange, and I think that Frank is a bit more right in his thinking about virtual platforms and how to use them. Read on for some comments on the exchange.
Read More →