Better Software. Faster!: Best Practices in Virtual Prototyping

by Tom De Schutter

Overview

The recent rise of "smart" products has been made possible through tight co-design of hardware and software. The growing amount of software and hence processors in applications all around us allows for increased flexibility in the application functionality through its life cycle. Not so long ago a device felt outdated after you owned it for a couple of months. Today, a continuous stream of new software applications and updates make products feel truly "smart". The result is an almost magical user experience where the same product can do more today than it could do yesterday.

In this book we dive deep into a key methodology to enable concurrent hardware/software development by decoupling the dependency of the software development from hardware availability: virtual prototyping. The ability to start software development much earlier in the design cycle drives a true "shift-left" of the entire product development schedule and results in better products that are available earlier in the market.

Throughout the book, case studies illustrate how virtual prototypes are being deployed by major companies around the world. If you are interested in a quick feel for what virtual prototyping has to offer for practical deployment, we recommend picking a few case studies to read, before diving into the details of the methodology.

Of course, this book can only offer a small snapshot of virtual prototype use cases for faster software development. However, as most software bring-up, debug and test principles are similar across markets and applications, it is not hard to realize why virtual prototypes are being leveraged whenever software is an intrinsic part of the product functionality, after reading this book.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781617300141
Publisher:	Synopsys Press
Publication date:	03/17/2014
Series:	Synopsys Press
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	8 MB

About the Author

Tom De Schutter is responsible for driving the virtual prototyping business at Synopsys. He joined Synopsys through the acquisition of CoWare where he was the product marketing manager for transaction-level models. Tom has over 14 years of experience in system-level design and virtual prototyping through different marketing and engineering roles. Before joining the marketing team he managed the transaction-level modeling team at CoWare.