Industry Expert Blogs

Building a system on chip (SoC) from IP blocks requires system-level integration and bring-up, and that requires firmware working on the target. In a fast-paced development cycle, it is crucial to provide customers with IP blocks and tested firmware. In particular, at the bring-up stage, there may be very few debug capabilities at hand and, therefore, a firmware package that is pre-tested on multiple platforms and systems will speed up the integration effort. The driver package provides the following benefits:

• Abstracts implementation details through well-defined and use case-driven application programming interface (API)
• Enables early (pre-silicon) development of a board support package (BSP) / software development toolkit (SDK)
• Provides early reference to silicon validation.

Cadence soft-IP cores now come with firmware that has been tested in simulation, on our emulation platform and on FPGA boards.