How standards will enable hardware/software co-design

Virtual prototyping of complete hardware/software systems is the key for virtual component standards, but need to be raised to much higher levels of abstraction than conventional design practices, which are usually at the level of synthesizable register transfer level (RTL) for custom hardware or instruction set simulator for programmable core processors. The goal of the System Level Design Development Working Group of the VCI Alliance is to specify standard interfaces, standard data formats and standard methods that will help system designers to explore, debug and verify complex system architectures consisting of several virtual components by virtual prototyping at multiple levels of abstraction.