The Open Virtual Platform (OVP) initiative (www.OVPworld.org), founded by Imperas with the help of 18 companies and individuals from the embedded systems user community, processor intellectual property developers, electronic design automation, service providers and academia, has celebrated its one year anniversary.

The OVP initiative was founded with a donation by Imperas of approximately $4 million of simulation infrastructure. The goal of organization is to help the industry to build an effective multi-core development infrastructure through the use and adoption of open virtual platform technology. The website (www.OVPworld.org) serves as a portal for OVP members covering details about the technology, providing a discussion forum for the community, and links to download each component. The technology has the support of electronic design automation (EDA) companies, end users and silicon intellectual property (IP) providers.

As demand for Multi-Core platforms and MPSoCs increases the need for a suitable, cost effective virtualized software development environment has become critical. “We recognized the weaknesses inherent in the current development environments for software running on multi-core parallel platforms and MPSoCs and the success and support of the OVP initiative has been phenomenal ,” stated Simon Davidmann, president and CEO, Imperas and founding director of the OVP initiative. “We launched OVP a year ago to provide that infrastructure – free open source models and infrastructure focused on multi-core and speed – for simulating the platforms used for embedded software development. Our open virtual platforms provide a vehicle for
embedded software developers, deliver complete transparency and control over the software being developed. Simulation technology is the key.”

Imperas reports that the success of OVP is prompting processor vendors, OS providers and embedded systems companies and others to increase adoption of simulation technology and virtual platforms as key components in their development environments. Nine companies and institutions have already added their support to the original founding companies bringing the OVP membership to 27 companies. These include: Cadence, CriticalBlue, Denali, EVE, Forte, MIPS, SpringSoft, Tensilica, Doulos, PosedgeSoftware, VinChip.

Year One Milestones

The primary OVP objective is to enable the industry to build a suitable and effective multi-core virtual platform software development infrastructure. Year one OVP Milestones include:

• the development of 16 processor models

• the addition of a native interface to the SystemC/Transaction Level Modeling (TLM)-2.0 interface

• the availability of platforms that boot operating systems, including multi-core SMP Linux running faster than real time,

• the verification of processor models by 2 major vendors including the MIPS32 4K, 24K and 34K families being MIPS-Verified™ by MIPS Technologies and the ARC® 605 being verified by ARC International.

• research projects utilizing OVP by the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi and the University of Southampton

• the donation of open source peripheral and behavioral models to the OVP community, available for free download from the website

• the integration of other tools to the Open Virtual Platforms simulator (OVPsim) for enhanced software functional and performance verification, including Cadence’s Incisive Software eXtensions (ISX)

Open Virtual Platforms

OVP includes the OVPsim simulator, libraries of models and APIs for developing new models. OVPsim executes platforms, including multicore platforms, at hundreds of millions of instructions per second, providing the speed that software developers require for simulation of embedded systems. Model libraries include everything from individual processor and component models to more complex platforms, such as MIPS Malta development board for running Linux. APIs enable the community to develop models of processors, behavioral components and peripherals, and to connect these together into virtual platforms that run the final target system software binaries unchanged.