Design Cycle Acceleration for Hardware/Software Co-Design with Renode

Embedded systems design that involves “whole stack” co-design, including hardware, firmware, runtime (OS), and development toolchain, presents novel engineering challenges. Traditional hardware-led approaches do not work, as the software and toolchain need to co-evolve with the hardware. Complex tradeoffs around where in the stack to implement functionality and to optimize require hardware-software co-design. Dover Microsystems faced such challenges when implementing a cybersecurity product that involves both silicon IP and runtime & toolchain modifications. Dover is using the Renode open source functional simulation framework to drastically reduce their design cycle, rapidly explore architecture trade spaces, and engage in hardware/software co-design. In addition, the approach enables Dover to provide a simple and effective means for customers to evaluate the entire solution, and to begin adapting their software collateral in parallel with the hardware integration effort. Renode is backed by professional support from Antmicro, the creators of and primary contributors to Renode, whom Dover contracted to extend the framework with features necessary for their - and their customer’s - use cases. Antmicro and Dover Microsystems will jointly present a case study of how open-source, extensible, debuggable, and robust functional simulation has been critical to Dover’s success, and why it should become a standard part of all hardware and embedded system design and development efforts.