March 26, 2012 -- NEPHRON+, an EU research project, has recently selected Open Virtual Platforms (OVP) tools for its software and test development environment. Key factors in its decision were ease-of-use and flexibility of OVP, as well as the availability of ARM processor models chosen for the electronics system.

The NEPHRON+ project is developing a wearable artificial kidney and personal renal-care system. According to Frank Poppen of OFFIS (the Institute for Information Technology of Germany), the lead institution in the consortium for the embedded software development, "OVP was selected because of the ease with which models are built and the flexibility in interfacing to other tools. The availability of the ARM processor model we needed, and the open source nature of the OVP models, were also important factors."

One of OFFIS's development milestones was to interface the OVP simulator, OVPsim, to the Simulink system simulator. This was done to enable testing of the target software, running directly on the processor in the virtual platform, with the full system environment. Due to the open nature of the OVP technology, OFFIS was able to write its own interface model, which is now available on the OFFIS website.

OVP processor models are instruction accurate, and very fast. OVP processor models employ a just-in-time code morphing engine to accelerate simulation speeds. Virtual platforms utilizing these OVP processor models can be created with the OVP peripheral and platform models. The processor models can also be integrated into SystemC/ TLM2-based virtual platforms using the native TLM2 interface available with all OVP models. The native TLM2 interface enables multiple instantiations of the processor models in a single virtual platform, just as any other component would be instantiated. The OVP simulator can also be encapsulated within the Eclipse IDE, enabling easy use for software developers.