Better Software. Faster!

Book excerpt: The recent rise of "smart" products has been made possible through tight co-design of hardware and software. The growing amount of software and hence processors in applications all around us allows for increased flexibility in the application functionality through its life cycle. Not so long ago a device felt outdated after you owned it for a couple of months. Today, a continuous stream of new software applications and updates make products feel truly "smart". The result is an almost magical user experience where the same product can do more today than it could do yesterday.

In this book we dive deep into a key methodology to enable concurrent hardware/software development by decoupling the dependency of the software development from hardware availability: virtual prototyping. The ability to start software development much earlier in the design cycle drives a true "shift-left" of the entire product development schedule and results in better products that are available earlier in the market.

Throughout the book, case studies illustrate how virtual prototypes are being deployed by major companies around the world. If you are interested in a quick feel for what virtual prototyping has to offer for practical deployment, we recommend picking a few case studies to read, before diving into the details of the methodology.

Of course, this book can only offer a small snapshot of virtual prototype use cases for faster software development. However, as most software bring-up, debug and test principles are similar across markets and applications, it is not hard to realize why virtual prototypes are being leveraged whenever software is an intrinsic part of the product functionality, after reading this book.