A Flexible Virtual Development Environment for Embedded Systems

On-time delivering of an embedded system solution to market is very crucial because the market is highly competitive and the demands of consumers rapidly change. Virtual development environment increases efficiency of the embedded system development because it enables developers to develop, execute, and verify an embedded system without real hardware. This paper deals with an implementation of a virtual development environment for ARM core-based embedded systems. The environment is developed based on ARMs ARMulator that is an instruction set simulation environment. The developed environment is extended to use SystemC hardware IP's by attaching a SystemC simulation engine to the modeled ASB bus. Therefore, the environment can use both ARMulator-based hardware models and SystemC-based hardware models. By adding hardware IP modules such as Memory controller, LCD controller, Interrupt controller, 1-ch DMA, UART, 2-ch Timer, Watchdog Timer, GPIO Ports and graphical user interface applications, the ARMulator environment is expanded to a virtual development environment for hand-held devices and general applications. In addition, a real-time operating system muC/OS-II is ported to the simulation environment so that the environment can be used to develop muC/OS-II-based application software. A three-task test program verifies the functionality of the hardware IP modules and muC/OS-II operations. Compared to other environments, its construction cost is very low and the environment can be easily modified according to a engineer's needs.