VSD speeds and simplifies system design engineering and marketing validation efforts.

Accelerated Architecture Investigation and Market Confidence

The virtual platform enables marketing, hardware and software teams to leave behind a paper-trail of documents and to define the system architecture in a hands-on, dynamic and demonstrable manner.

With VSD, engineers can perform what-if analysis and explore alternate architectures, including:

• Migration of a function from software running on a CPU to an independent accelerator (e.g. ASIC, FPGA, PLCD)
• Investigating a change in the number of platforms (e.g. configuring a system with three routers and six switches or two routers and seven switches)
• Verification of an application’s correct operation after porting from a single-threaded platform, to a multi-threaded platform

Marketing teams can show a working, virtual model of the system to prospective customers at the very outset of the project.

• Proposed features can be demonstrated and fine-tuned with the customer
• Usability issues can be discovered and corrected
• Customer-specific scalability issues can be vetted
• Sales teams can begin their sales engagement immediately

When virtual platforms were used on the previous product generation, they are especially valuable to the system design process. Here, the flexibility and scalability of virtual platforms allows new hardware configurations to be created and validated against the previous generation's application stack. This approach can eliminate or resolve many system design and software issues from the very outset of the project.