Application-level Hybrid Emulation for Software-Defined-Systems

Over the last 10 years, Hybrid Emulation has been widely deployed for Early SW bring-up and HW/SW validation. Combining a fast virtual prototype of the CPU sub-system with the RTL of the remaining SoC running on an emulator typically produces a 10x speed-up over full emulation setups and saves precious emulator resources. ​

Recent advances in both virtual prototyping and emulation now yield another leap in hybrid performance, which enables pre-silicon execution of full Software stacks, including end-user applications.

In an emerging world of Software-defined Systems, this provides invaluable insight for the validation and optimization of HW resources and their deployment by Software applications under realistic use-case scenarios, like AI-enabled functions, autonomous drive stacks, end-to-end networking applications, etc.​

In this tutorial, we will first review the latest state-of-the-art of hybrid emulation technologies and use-cases. We will then illustrate the application of hybrid emulation for the pre-silicon validation and optimization of Software-defined Systems.