Implementation of a flexible development platform for simultaneous support of software and hardware development flow

The biggest problem with SoC design is that there are two distinct heterogeneous development environments for hardware and software; Software engineers use software development tools such as compilers and debuggers to develop software codes for processor cores. Hardware engineers use traditional HDL development tools such as logic synthesizer and HDL simulators. Practically, there is no unified verification environment that encompasses both software and hardware domains. This paper describes design and implementation of a flexible development platform which supports software development flow and hardware development flow at the same time. The development platform is composed of prototyping hardware with processor core(s) and a simulation accelerator. The prototyping hardware provides a software development environment and the accelerator provides hardware development environment. They are interconnected with a bidirectional channel for synchronization.