Description: The usage of virtual prototypes for software development has been steadily growing over the past few years. This usage has paved the way for more advanced use cases like real world connectivity and preparedness for standard like ISO 26262 (automotive software). This presentation will share Nvidia’s experience with developing PCIe software using real world connectivity. We will give a preview on how pre-silicon platforms built using a Synopsys VDK are being used in regressions and how these platforms come in handy even after silicon is available. Finally, the presentation will highlight the aspects that need to be considered when developing models for use in a virtual prototype.

Praveen Wadikar

Principal Architect

Description: The arrival of engineering samples (ES) is an important inflection point in ASIC projects. At this point, a painful triple-blind process begins, trying to bring-up unproven software on new chips and new boards. This often causes unpredictable project delay, which can be minimized by preloading the software development effort to the pre-ES phase. To that end, Synopsys VDK (Virtual Prototype) technology enables new opportunities for simulation-based pre-ES testing. By integrating a VDK into the ASIC design and validation process, we successfully brought up a new ES SoC system to run Linux within four days. This presentation shows the required steps to accomplish this feat.

Phoenix Yuan

Technical Project Lead

Description: Embedded software complexity continues to grow in the automotive domain. Sophisticated functionalities, connectivity and active safety are key features of modern vehicle architectures. Therefore, all related testing activities play a central and significant role within the software development process. Since testing must be done in the early stages to catch issues prior to production release, this typically has a non-negligible impact on hardware resource availability, in terms of both target embedded controllers and Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) benches, with related costs. To be effective and efficient in this challenging contest, at PUNCH we introduced Virtual Hardware Prototyping as an innovative technology, on top of the Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD), to maximize the testing capability at different levels. During the development phase, this solution helps finding issues both at unit testing level as at system integration level, by replicating the real testing environment with virtual prototypes. This increases the number of testing platforms and improves related availability (HA) and stability in a semi/full automated fashion. The proposed solution is highly scalable, due to the efficient parallelization based on a grid of virtual nodes. The improved software quality, the cost saving, and the reduction of time to market, are just three of the tangible outcomes obtained by adopting this approach.

Simone Longo

Virtual Modeling & Environment Workgroup Leader