Software Development

Virtualization of the embedded development environment frees projects from the limitations, availability, and costs of embedded hardware and hardware test benches.

By moving development from an embedded hardware bench to an ‘all in software’ virtualized environment, you can radically improve and accelerate your development process, reduce costs, reduce time to market, and improve your product performance and quality as well.

Reasons why you should use VLAB:

Individuals

  • Start software development early, before hardware is available or even designed
  • Explore different configurations freely, experiment and optimise
  • Develop with the real target architecture, toolchains, libraries, operating systems, and tests
  • Debug, trace, analyse non-intrusively, repeatably, transparently, not possible with hardware
  • Automate all repeatable tasks and workflows

Teams and Organisations

  • Scale development unconstrained by the availability of embedded targets or benches
  • Continuously develop, debug, integrate, and test, for iterative and agile development
  • Collaborate and share between different users and teams in the development cycle
  • Isolate and protect one development project or configuration from another
  • Reduce cost of set up, operation, and maintenance through the development cycle

VLAB solutions for Software Development:

Individuals

  • Start with simple Configure, Load, Run, Debug virtualization based workflows
  • Take advantage of Debug, Trace, Profile, and Analysis tools not available with hardware
  • Run and debug multiple configurations or scenarios in parallel with unlimited VLAB instances

Teams and Organisations

  • Scale for the number of users and VLAB instances required
  • Deliver project wide continuous build, integration, test and delivery
  • Snapshot and share virtual environments and system states

Start Early

Reduce Risk. Don’t wait for or live with the limitations of embedded hardware. Start developing and integrating software and tests on your desktop with VLAB.

Target Ready

Compile and build software for the target and run on the host without any modification. In-built VLAB debug, test and analysis is non-intrusive, no code modifications or special builds are required.

Step Inside

Get complete visibility to the internal structure, state and execution of both hardware and software, making it that much easier to understand, correct or validate the behaviour of your system. Access, observe, trace, and analyse anything.

Explore Freely

Need more memory to debug that problem? Want to try adding another core to your platform? Failure scenario that needs testing but will damage your equipment? All of it is possible in VLAB.

Virtualize

Shift from an environment of boards and cables to everything in software, where 1 board can instantly be 1000s of boards that don’t break or degrade over time and can be instantly shared regardless of geography.

Automate

All in software means pressing that button, flicking that switch … all of those steps that used to have to be ticked off your checklist are gone. Simply script VLAB to perform the task, which it will do in a repeatable and deterministic way.

Share

A problem shared is a problem halved… Developing with VLAB makes it simple to bring others into the process, regardless of their location.

Iterate

Iterate through development and find problems as they occur, with automation enabling Continuous Integration and Testing.

Same … but better

Working with VLAB will feel much the same as working with the hardware.
  • Edit and build your code on your PC before loading it onto the target
  • Connect your debugger of choice, set some break points
  • Run and debug
  • Analyse any generated data fed to analysis tools
  • … and repeat
    • There is no learning curve, no ramp up time and training to do. Install, configure, and run. For those who want to do much more than can be done on the hardware, there is a rapid path to all value added capabilities
    • Unlimited tracing of both hardware and software
    • Scripted hardware and software debug control
    • Non-intrusive software analysis
    • … the list goes on

For the individual

If you want to develop, integrate and run software and tests on your desktop in a virtual environment, freed from the limitations of embedded hardware. If you want to automate your entire workflow and enable agile and iterative, continuous development, integration, and test.

What you will need to get started:

  • 1x VLAB Essentials or 1x VLAB Workstation (unlimited VDM)
  • 1x User selected Processor Architecture
    Additional Processor Architecture targets can be added where required.

Collaborating in a team

Want to enable project teams or groups of engineers with scalable, lower cost access to virtualization, along with enhanced support for collaboration? Our recommendation would be to consider a combined desktop and server solution.

VLAB Workstation on the desktop gives you:

  • 1x User selected Processor Architecture
  • 1x VLAB Workstation giving Unlimited VDM to develop, debug and test

VLAB Server can be added on a separate host with:

  • 1x User selected Processor Architecture
  • Unlimited VDM instances, regularly used for Continuous Integration / Continuous Test

Access to VLAB Server instances requires a Workstation license.

Find out more

Software Development is such a vast discipline that we can’t in one page cover all of the different ways that VLAB can make a difference. If you have questions or would like to see a demonstration then let us know.

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