Launching X-Spec: Magillem eXecutable Specification Tools Suite enables Internet of Things smart nodes prototyping
Paris, France – June 3rd, 2015. Magillem , the leading provider of EDA xml based solutions and best-in-class tools to reduce the global cost of complex designs, offers the only front end design solution covering Specification to ESL to RTL with the same IEEE1685 xml design database.
Magillem software platform is used to assemble the largest SoCs in the world: wireless, set top boxes, processors… and has proven to be the most versatile and powerful connectivity and register management environment. Also easily addressed are ASICs or FPGAs with multiple configurations.
Magillem at DAC 2015 : Virtual prototyping meeting IoT Specific requirements
Whether one calls it Internet of Things (IoT) or Connected Things (through Internet or LAN), what lies before us really is the sensors revolution: smart sensors everywhere. Analysts predict there will be billions of electronic devices connected in the world by 2020. How to ensure these smart embedded electronic systems (including sensors, actuators, MEMS…) and the software to control them will properly and safely communicate?
This implies new challenges for the Electronic industry:
- Many more analog objects (sensors, actuators, MEMS…) come into play,
- Sensors become (smart) actors: they embed a processor (and hence software) to take local decision and react,
- Almost every device includes a communication unit and therefore the need to reinforce its security to prevent it from external damage,
- The complexity of electronic systems is distributed to dedicated small devices rather than centralized on traditional processing devices (phones, tablets, PCs, servers),
- At the same time, mass data is centralized on clouds (or intermediate processing nodes) and stored/accessed from local devices.
The cost of functional errors coupled with the market pressure to deliver embedded system products in time, lead to the need to build early prototypes of these systems.
These traditional prototyping methods , based on (low-cost) FPGA boards or (expensive) Hardware Emulators , often fail to meet aggressive product development schedules, because the vast majority of software is developed and verified after the RTL design is implemented. They are inappropriate for analog IP or AMS designs or when the number of connected devices is too important to be implemented with physical boards.
This is particularly true for semiconductor and OEM companies developing next-generation IoT systems integrating smart sensors.
Magillem can uniquely accompany its customers to address these challenges by providing a specific suite of tools:
“Magillem eXecutable Specification tools suite (X-Spec) comprises a set of software modules to create, integrate, configure, manage and validate specification documents for smart electronic devices. An executable specification is an executable model running on a host machine (e.g. PC, server) representing the functionality of a smart electronic device that can execute software to control it. This executable model can be seen as a virtualization of the electronic device. Among the set of virtual models, our solution focusses on the fastest functionally accurate model — the Virtual Prototype, preserving the coherency with other executable models (e.g. Spice, RTL, C, Matlab…) and documentation models” says Jean Michel FERNANDEZ, VP Business Unit ESL Products.
The Magillem X-Spec (MXS) tool suite includes:
- [MXS-pack], a Fast Virtual IP authoring tool that helps creating a virtual IP from a user specification document or another executable model, keeping all the IP representations in sync.
- [MXS-plug], this Virtual IP can be plugged to a 3rd party or user-created base Virtual Platform to realize a user-specific functionality using the Virtual Platform extension tool.
- [MXS-conf], the extended Virtual Platform can then be exported as a single self-contained executable to the embedded software development teams or to the software verification teams to be further configured with the Virtual Platform Configuration tool.
The Software teams can seamlessly connect the configured executable spec to their preferred embedded software debuggers such as Lauterbach TRACE32 System, ARM Development Studio 5 (DS-5™) or GDB to develop and bring-up their embedded software (including device driver, operating system or middleware).
Magillem X-Spec (MXS) tool suite offer major benefits:
- Start software development months before physical prototyping board availability
- Seamless integration with the most popular software debuggers
- Seamless integration with the most popular virtual hardware platform providers
- Coherency between all representations of an electronic system
- Management and configuration of your electronic system variants and derivatives
Magillem’s X-Spec is based on IEEE standards (SystemC 1666 and IP-XACT 1685), using Accellera open source SystemC simulator and embeds the widest open source library of Virtual IP (OVP) together with the Imperas processor models. It also provides connections to Documentation and Requirement databases and tools.
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