A VM-based HW/SW codesign platform with multiple teams for the development of 3D graphics application

As today's consumer electronics get increasingly portable and ubiquitous, rising complexity succeeds to more functionalities integrated. Market dynamics and competitiveness further squeeze the time-to-market requirement, consequently pushing system designers to the very throughout consideration during the development process. Traditional development approaches could not satisfy with such compact demands. This paper presents a novel virtual machine (VM)-based SoC design method for developing the 3D graphics applications which makes different designers work together simultaneously and guarantees the consistency of the test benches among software and several abstraction levels of hardware to expedite the overall development process. The proposed general VM-based platform suits for HW/SW co-design. To reduce simulation time, the authors enhance the general interface as application-specific interface without modification of developing hardware and software. It improves 4%~1636% than the original one. Eventually, six complete test benches are executed on VM-based platform as well as on FPGA-based platform and gather the respective data for verification demand.