VirtualBridge Adapters

The Cadence^® VirtualBridge^™ Adapter is a software adapter enabling user applications and OS drivers to establish a virtual protocol connection to Cadence Palladium^® emulation and Protium^™ prototyping platforms. The VirtualBridge adapter enables system validation early in a development cycle for purposes such as:

• Emulating hardware design along with software applications via OS drivers
• Running software application testing against emulated hardware via OS drivers
• Performing software OS driver verification

For hardware/software system design, OS driver, and bare-metal software development, engineers require early access to designs being emulated in the Palladium family of verification-compute platforms. The VirtualBridge adapter provides a convenient connection from a software developer’s workstation environment to the hardware design.

The VirtualBridge adapter consists of a transactor that enables high-speed transactions between a user’s design under test (DUT) running in a Palladium platform and a host workstation. A user’s application can drive traffic via their existing OS driver into the transactor, either directly on the same host workstation or via a networked connection. The user’s applications can run on any OS supported by the virtual machine, thus de-coupling the application OS requirements from the hardware host workstation requirements.

The VirtualBridge adapter is a fully static solution, enabling full clock control. This allows clocks to be stopped without encountering motherboard/chipset timeout issues. Users can, for example, pause an active emulation to upload metrics to a workstation to analyze design performance.