TABLE OF CONTENTS Throughout the development of a new SoC platform, various teams participating in the hardware design are always interested in running software programs on the platform. Be it any team varying from RTL design to functional verification and integration, early software execution means early catching of hardware or software problems. More essentially, executing software on the target platform helps to identify any potential mismatch between software and hardware designs.
In spite of its very attractive advantages, getting ready the software for early phases of SoC design cycle should never be done at any inappropriate cost of software development. The software should be executed on a development platform that is as close as possible to the final hardware platform. That will increase the probability of software reuse on the target platform with very little or virtually no modification on the subsequent hardware platforms. Such reuses trim down not only the overall software development time, but also the cost of refining software for these platforms.
A key parameter of developing the software targeted at running on TLM platforms is the immediate usability of the software in the current hardware design process. It is not quite convincing to claim a software piece being developed early in a project useful if that software piece could only be validated on a later hardware platform. The software must be tested on the target hardware platform while it is being developed. To bring the software and hardware design in parallel, they...
