August 24, 2010 -- As embedded systems hardware becomes more powerful, the demand for high quality, sophisticated and compelling applications is increasing. This has led to the majority of embedded application developers to reusable legacy software and sophisticated development tools to ease the pressure. Embedded system virtual platforms constitute one such class of embedded development tools that replace the use of target hardware reference boards for faster and easier embedded application development.

This article discusses the class of virtual platforms called host simulations. With host simulation, the embedded application code is compiled for the host processor using native compilers and executed directly on the host machine. Host simulation would require the simulation models of all the peripheral devices used by the application for its execution on a host machine. If the device simulation models for one target reference board have been carefully designed and implemented in a host simulation, they can be reused to simulate other reference boards with similar peripheral devices.

This article presents the characteristics of reusable device simulation models, and the methods to design and implement them. It also discusses the steps required to execute an embedded application code on a host machine using host simulation.

By Zeeshan Anwar. (Anwar is with Mentor Graphics Corp., Altrincham, United Kingdom.)