A Survey of Virtual Prototyping Techniques for System Development and Validation

Recently, different kinds of computer systems like smart phones, embedded systems and cloud servers, are more and more widely used and the system development and validation is under great pressure. Hardware device, firmware and device driver development account for a significant portion of system development and validation effort. In traditional device, firmware and driver development largely has to wait until a stable version of the device becomes available. This dependency often leaves not enough time for software validation. Recently, virtual prototyping techniques have been widely explored and utilized by both industry engineers and academic researchers. White box nature of virtual prototyping brings better observability, traceability, debugging support and adaptability. First, virtual prototyping has found their way into enabling early firmware and driver development and validation. Second, there has been some research utilizing virtual prototyping for post-silicon functional validation. Third, the industry has built hybrid emulation and hybrid FPGA systems for system validation using virtual prototyping. In this paper, we demonstrate how recent work and products utilize virtual prototyping techniques for system development and validation in the above three domains.