System Emulation and Digital Twins in Aerospace Applications
Abstract
Over the past decades the complexity of systems to be designed has grown at breathtaking pace. What may look to an individual design team like a system, almost certainly turns out to be a component in a yet bigger system. Individual, licensable blocks of semiconductor IP like processors, peripherals and buses are integrated into licensable subsystems. In turn, these become components in Systems on Chips (SoCs), with their miniaturization following Moores Law and productivity improvements keeping design cost affordable through tools and re-use enabled by the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry. SoCs in turn become components on Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) in products, that get integrated into systems like the F-35 Fighter jet. While the F-35 is arguably the most sophisticated machine on the planet, integrating 200,000 parts from 1,600 suppliers using 3,500 integrated circuits (ICs) and 200 unique chips with more than 20 million lines of software code, the F-35 becomes just a component of the yet bigger system of the air traffic and communications network. System emulation bears the potential of improving preproduction quality with first time success of designs, allowing to collapse the serial development pipeline, speed up of verification run-times and allowing easier and earlier distribution of platforms for software development, not to mention that increased safety during testing as a crash in a simulator is much better than putting real lives at risk. System Emulation also has significant overlap with what the industry calls Digital Twin, virtual representations of the system to which the same stimulus can be applied. This paper analyzes the challenges for system emulation for electronic devices and systems. Using practical user examples from the commercial SoC world, we will outline the benefits emulating systems of various scopes and levels of abstract early in the design flow, using virtual and physical emulation.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Mar 25, 2019
- Accession Number
- AD1076214
Entities
People
- Frank Schirrmeister
Organizations
- Cadence Design Systems