US : Virtio Corporation, creator of Virtual Platforms for embedded software development, has enhanced its offering, the VPOM-2420 Virtual Platform ( see above ) release 2.0, for the Texas Instruments (TI) OMAP platform used in advanced 3G smartphones. The product, which provides fast, full-function emulation for TI's OMAP2420 software development platform, is now able to emulate the on-board TWL92230 System Power Manager.

Virtual Platforms give software developers a target system model that can boot an operating system and run application code long before hardware becomes available, speeding new system software development. The addition of power-management emulation allows developers to evaluate and control the impact of that software on system power.

Filip Thoen, chief technology officer for Virtio, noted, "The VPOM-2420 Virtual Platform now allows developers to understand how their software interacts with the on-board power manager in concert with their OS power-management services. The ability to evaluate the effect of software, including visualizing power usage over time, is essential to extending battery life in handheld devices.” Thoen added that the customer experience with software development using a software emulator shows a productivity improvement of two to five times compared to traditional development practices.

The VPOM-2420 Virtual Platform uses a combination of the C programming language, graphical modeling and transaction-based modeling to replicate the full functionality of TI’s OMAP2420 System-on-Chip, containing several on-chip ARM and DSP processors, Image and Video Acceleration (IVA) and 2D/3D graphics acceleration subsystems, connectivity peripherals like USB and the power manager; the display, keypad, touch-screen subsystems; the daughter cards; and system I/O, like USB, Ethernet and camera input. Virtio’s virtual I/O technology emulates system I/O in software, allowing developers to connect real-world peripherals such as a USB camera through the host workstation. The technology also enables simulation of other peripherals on the Virtual Platform, including MMC cards containing application code.

The VPOM-2420 Virtual Platform gives software developers a jumpstart in creating and debugging both system and application code for the OMAP2420, but its utility continues even when hardware becomes available. All of Virtio’s Virtual Platforms provide developers with insight into the internal operations of processor cores and peripheral hardware in ways that hardware-oriented debugging tools cannot. Developers can examine and modify the state of internal registers and buffers that are unreachable by externally attached hardware probes. The VPOM-2420 Virtual Platform supports the development of various software types: device drivers, operating-system ports, (secure) ROM code and (secure) applications, audio and video codecs, mobile (video) applications, and DSP applications, all while being able to perform in-depth software optimization for on-chip hardware for 2D/3D graphics, imaging and video.

Adding emulation of the TI TWL92230 System Power Manager now gives software developers the ability to fully understand the interaction of their software with hardware power management on the OMAP platform. The emulation both allows control of the power-management hardware and provides insights into the interaction of the hardware with the independent power-management services of the operating system. Developers can visualize power usage over time through Vcore versus time graphs to verify that desired power states have been invoked or implemented correctly.

The VPOM-2420 Virtual Platform supports standard operating systems such as Symbian OS and MontaVista Linux and can execute binary code files that target the OMAP2420 platform. In addition, the platform integrates with essential software development tools such as Metrowerks Code Composer Studio and the ARM development tools. The Virtual Platform has been tested against TI’s validation suites and OS board-support packages to ensure complete binary compatibility.

Pricing and Availability
Virtio's VPOM-2420 Virtual Platform release 2.0 with power-management emulation starts at $2,488 USD and is immediately available. Existing users will receive an automatic update of the VPOM-2420 containing the model of the power manager by using Virtio’s standard Web update capabilities.