Applying hardware/software co-design to systems-on-a-chip

Systems-on-silicon or systems-on-a-chip (SOC) are becoming more common as the capabilities of the silicon foundries, and the supporting technologies of hardware description languages and simulation continue to mature. Successful development programs for SOC-based designs will require that these tools continue to evolve and that the development teams also evolve their project methods in order to take full advantage of the capabilities of these emerging SOC design and development tools. Presently, one of the most promising techniques is HW/SW co-design and co-verification. Co-design enables the HW and SW designers to jointly attack the SOC project by giving the SW designer access to the virtual hardware under development before silicon is available and enables the hardware designer to exercise the design with the actual operational software, rather than laboriously generated test vectors.