Virtual Prototyping In SoC Development

Investment into a model-driven development approach is needed to speed up the development process. Modern semiconductor technologies enable manufacturers to pack more and more functions and memory into a single silicon die. While steadily advancing microintegration based on Moore's Law just a few years ago mainly focused on increasing the clock frequency of integrated circuits (IC), today, it's the design complexity and number of blocks that enable new IC functions. More and more logic blocks, processor cores, accelerators, and memory - in what is referred to as a system on a chip (SoC) - allow embedded systems to do more than what may have seemed possible not too long ago.