DVCon (Design and Verification Conference) Europe is coming up in early December, in person, in München, Germany. The selection of papers and posters is finished, and the program is firming up. I am happy to report that I am part of two items on the menu, a personal record for DVCon! For more on DVCon Europe in general and how it has been in the past, see my previous blog post on DVCon Europe 2022.
Paper about Virtual Platforms for Programmable Hardware
My Intel colleague Kalen Brunham and I will present the paper “Challenges and Solutions for Creating Virtual Platforms of FPGA and SASIC Designs”. Kalen is from the Intel Programmable Solutions Group (PSG, also known as “Intel FPGA”, and Altera before the company was acquired by Intel). FPGAs are pretty cool pieces of hardware, but they are a bit of a bother when it comes to building virtual platforms (VP) since they are not “fixed” designs that we can model once. Instead, users will configure a certain FPGA platform to suit their needs and add their own custom hardware units.
However, there are ways to generate VPs for FPGAs from the design information captured in FPGA design tools. The information about the hardware configuration, memory map, and custom hardware mappings is already there, and it is mostly a matter of transforming it into something that can run in a VP.
Tutorial on Correctness of VP
In another collaboration, Ola Dahl from Ericsson and I have cooked up a tutorial on correctness and testing of virtual platform models, called “Verification of Virtual Platform Models – What do we Mean with Good Enough?”.
This came out of a meeting we had in early 2022 where we realized that we both had very similar experiences when it came to how VPs are viewed by various stakeholders in our respective companies. There seem to be common understandings and misunderstandings about what “correctness” really means. Especially when both software and hardware designers meet the VP, from their rather different perspectives.
DVCon Europe 2022 is going to be great, hope to see as many people as possible there (despite the challenging economic times).
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