Empowering your hardware engineers

This is an exciting time in any design cycle, but it can also be the most stressful. Sleep may not come so easily for the hardware team. When you think about it, the prototype is the realization of a new schematic, a new PCB layout, and a board full of new components. The likelihood of all these new design elements coming together and working out of the box are pretty slim.Unfortunately today, many hardware engineers will acknowledge that they don’t thoroughly verify a new design. And this may be reflected in an Accenture report stating that the US alone saw $17B in consumer electronic returns in 2011. The reason for the poor verification coverage is generally time pressure and a lack of tools. Poor design verification practices manifest themselves in unexplained system crashes, hardware / software finger pointing, and delayed releases. It may not be surprising that Embedded Market forecasters report 52.1% of all 32 bit designs were behind schedule last year.

Chennai Engineering CollegesThe fundamental problem is that there is a lack of hardware verification processes and tools for boards.  The development process moves from design to hardware / software integration, bypassing the critical hardware verification step. It is time to empower the hardware design team with the tools needed to confidently release prototypes to the software team, as well as releasing a design into production. A verification process will also eliminate the cost and time associated with unnecessary design spins.

Engineering GraduationA better prototype experienceWhen the hardware prototype arrives, the design team typically attempts to boot the application OS (e.g. Linux or Android) after doing some preliminary power and clock checks. The software team needs the prototype running Linux as soon as possible for software development, so what alternative do they have? What if you added a design verification step?The objective of the prototype design verification process is to prove that the design and implementation (they are different) meet the functional requirements, and are production ready BEFORE final release to the software team, and ultimately manufacturing. With the right tools and process, this step should take less than a week. Trying to accomplish this with the application OS (e.g. Linux) is very challenging given the application OS was never intended for hardware verification. One of the fundamental benefits of an application OS is hardware abstraction, which is counter to the direct hardware access needed for hardware verification.  Another drawback of the application OS is a lack of functional tests and debug capabilities needed by the hardware team. Sure they can be created, but they are an afterthought, and at what cost?