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Commercial Virtuality
Learning from SwitchCore and Simics
Virtual embedded platforms for software development have been in active use for years. Many of the biggest companies
involved in the creation of complex embedded systems with hardware and software development competing for the dubious honor of owning the bold
"critical path" line in Microsoft Project realized long ago that a simulation-based software development environment offered numerous
advantages.
Usually these companies developed their own "home grown" solutions – creating one-shot systems that simulated
their particular hardware platforms, then deploying them to eager software development teams waiting to get started so they could avoid the long
work nights and weekends associated with being the long pole in the project schedule tent. These simulators were generally thrown away as soon as
they were used, making way for development of a new one for the next project.
SwitchCore, "Sweden's Fastest Growing Company," develops integrated switching chipsets for use in communications
networks. SwitchCore's devices are used in a wide variety of high-performance ethernet-based switching systems. Since their end products are complex
systems-on-chip (SoCs) developed using a custom silicon methodology, SwitchCore's developers can't often do software development using actual
hardware. Developing software and hardware simultaneously, SwitchCore saw a great deal of potential in virtual platforms for software development. [more]
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Catapult Levels Up
Mentor Attacks ESL Subsystem Design
In my book, ESL is a serious contender for the title of "worst technical term of the decade." As we've discussed
before, the ESL label was possibly created by Dataquest in an attempt to create a category that could hold all of the EDA products that didn't fit
cleanly into any of the previously established tool categories. As such, ESL turned into more of a "bucket" than a "category" as it snowballed down
the mountain of misfit design software, accumulating technologies such as transaction-level simulation tools, graphical block-based design
environments, high level language modeling, behavioral hardware synthesis, alternative hardware description languages, digital signal processing
analysis and design tools, software/hardware co-development aids, and teaching English to non-native English speakers.
OK, maybe that last one wasn't Dataquest's fault. [more]
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