Co-designing hardware and software is a long and iterative process specific to embedded system design. Mainly driven by hardware prototype iterations, it makes project time and cost hard to forecast.
While software modifications can be done in a modular and non-destructive way, reworking on hardware implies production of new prototypes. Moreover, software optimizations being strongly hardware-dependent, the software development could remain idle during hardware re-prototyping. This uncertainty on time and cost makes embedded systems projects hard to fund. In the end, ambitious projects are mostly reserved to large companies.
Hardware simulation and virtual prototyping contributes to solve this issue. A virtual prototype consists in a software application representing the system's hardware behavior, allowing system's software to be directly executed without the real hardware. Once available, a virtual prototype reduces embedded system time-to-market and development cost.
However, virtual prototype development cost makes them inaccessible. Hardware simulation leverages models which are hard to find and which interoperability is lacking. Each company should invest and maintain its own virtual prototyping solution. That is why in Hiventive, we believe that the emergence of an open source, unified, normalized hardware and software ecosystem leveraging state-of-the-art virtual prototyping technologies and methodologies is necessary to boost and widely generalize the use of virtual prototypes. Thus, we will present our innovative open source collection of solutions to enable and empower virtual prototyping for everyone.
