Profit is the name of the game in today's economy. Companies that use their resources efficiently to achieve the highest success rates in specifying and delivering products in the most cost effective manner will thrive today and in the future. No longer is time-to-market the only winning factor. Time-to-profitability is the ultimate measure of strength, illustrating the shift in today's business model.

The current market focus on electronic system-level (ESL) solutions improves the development process so that the viability of a product can be assessed as early as possible.

The majority of ESL solutions attack the problem from a verification perspective. Approaching ESL as a verification problem, one might ask, How do I verify my software and hardware will work together? Such an approach requires that most of the design be complete, along with a high degree of detail to support verification of both hardware and software.

While verification is an important part of the dynamic, it will always be performed as a bottom-up process. Each building block is validated as a standalone entity and the interaction of blocks is accomplished through integration until the top-level system design is reached.

Following this approach won't yield the desired early feedback regarding product viability. At Virtio, we believe the answer is to leverage what has been learned in platform-based design and change how system-level design is viewed. Most projects don't need to start with a blank sheet of paper specifying hardware and software. Instead, the majority of projects need to assemble and integrate large blocks of functionality and determine if the integrated platform can meet product requirements.

Profitability as well as time-to-market can be best addressed by using embedded-processor subsystems or commercial silicon system-on-chip platforms. Both run operating systems and have integrated software development environments and middleware to deliver the most cost-effective product development solutions.

The resulting model is an executable specification that can provide valuable information regarding bottlenecks and problems. The system-level assessment will focus the team's energy on locating problems and solving them to meet delivery schedules and profitability requirements.

Further, this approach efficiently enables concurrent software development and software/hardware integration to avoid the late and difficult process of integrating software after hardware arrives. Because the specification is a system-level testbench, it can be used by hardware developers to validate the hardware design by plugging it into the executable specification of the product.