Industry Expert Blogs

Embedded software development has become the main pain point in many of today's complex systems on chip (SoCs). Is it time to recognize software as the "center of gravity" in SoC development, and to work towards a continuous co-development of hardware and software throughout the design and verification flow?

Jim Ready thinks so, and you should listen, because this is the man who developed the first commercially viable real-time operating system (RTOS) and who later pioneered embedded Linux commercialization. Today, Ready is Chief Technology Advisor for Software and Embedded Systems at Cadence. He recently wrote an article for RTC Magazine that details his thinking about a "software-driven SoC development" flow.

In early 2013, I blogged about "software-driven verification," which is one aspect of software-driven development. With software-driven verification, engineers use software running on an embedded processor model to build testbenches for hardware verification. It's a reality today but is generally an ad-hoc methodology with minimal tool support. But software-driven verification is just one part of a broader vision, and I recently talked with Ready to learn what that vision is.

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