Shortening SoC design time with new prototyping flow on reconfigurable platform

A modern SoC contains complex hardware components and a huge amount of software. These software parts, including the operating system, become so complex that their validation and debug is not feasible anymore by classical ISS based simulation approaches. Hardware prototypes are built to allow early software development and hardware-software integration. However the development of an application specific prototype takes a lot of time and effort. In this paper, we present an efficient approach for complex SoC prototyping on reconfigurable prototyping platform. This method provides all advantages of hardware prototyping solutions, but it avoids the time and cost required to build an application specific prototype.