Industry
High Tech
High Tech Solutions to Drive Business Transformation through Technology
Highlights
- Virtual prototype development (VPD) enables faster, flexible and cost-efficient semiconductor product development by supporting parallel hardware–software engineering and early validation before silicon availability.
- Standardization and ecosystem collaboration are essential to unlock VPD’s full potential, improve model portability and accelerate innovation across the global semiconductor value chain.
- Adopting VPD can reduce tape-out time by up to 50%, enhance design quality, and help semiconductor companies meet rising performance, reliability and time-to-market demands.
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Overview
The semiconductor industry is undergoing a major transformation driven by rapid advancements in technologies such as AI/ML, IoT, 5G, cybersecurity and automation.
In this highly competitive environment, demand for advanced features, higher quality, reliability and lower cost continues to increase. At the same time, time-to-market expectations are becoming more aggressive.
However, designing, developing and taping out modern silicon chips has become a risk-prone and cost-intensive process. Growing functional complexity, demanding performance standards, and technical constraints are putting significant pressure on semiconductor companies. Today, the industry is navigating one of its most challenging phases and requires innovative approaches that enhance operational efficiency and accelerate product delivery.
Industry players must therefore explore new methodologies - including VPD—to improve efficiency, reduce development cycles, contain costs, and enhance customer experience.
VPD offers tremendous potential to reshape semiconductor product development and support a smarter and more scalable future. While VPD helps address existing challenges, success depends on effective stakeholder alignment and industry-wide standardization to ensure portability, usability and global adoption.
Standardization in VPD is critical as it enables portability, flexibility, reusability and faster development cycles—supporting the growing need for advanced semiconductor innovation across sectors.
Bottlenecks in the semiconductor industry.
Semiconductor product development productivity is declining linearly but the design and development complexity has been growing exponentially during the last several years
Despite strong market growth, semiconductor product development productivity has declined, while design complexity has risen exponentially. Increasing demand for diverse new applications, regulatory certification requirements, and shrinking transistor sizes (moving towards 5nm and below) are causing delays and higher development costs.
Key challenges include:
- Rapidly rising customer expectations and demand for integrated future-ready solutions.
- Pressure to improve throughput, reduce latency, minimize power consumption and optimize costs.
- Limited visibility into product development status and resource allocation.
- Frequent requirement changes across design and tape-out cycles causing rework and cost escalation.
- Sequential development models (software begins after hardware availability), slowing delivery.
The industry needs a transformational approach that enables modularity, agility and parallel hardware-software development. VPD makes this possible by providing faster development cycles, flexible architectural design, reusable models and open integration ecosystems.
The promise of VPD
VPD models hardware components such as SoCs, CPUs or interfaces as executable software representations that simulate real hardware behaviour. Multiple components can be integrated to create a complete virtual system environment for early application, firmware and software testing.
Key benefits of VPD include:
- Parallel hardware and software development.
- Early defect detection and rapid design iteration.
- Reduced development time and faster time-to-market.
- Low cost of change and high design flexibility.
- Portability and reusability across systems and platforms.
Using VPD models early in projects helps teams validate performance and functionality long before silicon is available. This leads to significant cost savings and accelerated product introduction. Emerging technologies such as AI/ML, IoT, 5G, SDN/NFV, mobile devices and autonomous vehicles are driving huge demand for next-generation customized chips representing a trillion-dollar market opportunity. Growing adoption of open specifications like RISC-V further fuels industry readiness for VPD.
Driving faster product development.
The ability to test firmware, software and applications before hardware availability is a major operational advantage. VPD also supports exploration of multiple design alternatives early, enabling data-driven decisions and superior quality outcomes.
The global semiconductor industry generated USD 481 billion in 2018, and AI-related semiconductor revenue is expected to grow from USD 6 billion in 2019 to USD 30 billion by 2022 (PwC). To capture this opportunity, the industry must adopt standardized, flexible and collaborative development ecosystems.
Key stakeholders
Identifying key stakeholders for collaborative operations.
The key stakeholders in the semiconductor ecosystem include:
- Business and technology partners
- Third-party VPD model developers
- Internal model / system developers and integrators
- Semiconductor OEMs and ecosystem participants
Today, most semiconductor companies operate with proprietary VPD models and platforms, creating silos, high costs and steep learning curves. Standardization will improve portability, flexibility and productivity across the ecosystem. Developing VPD solutions requires expertise in C/C++/SystemC programming and deep hardware architecture knowledge. These niche skills must be cultivated and retained to scale innovation.
Building blocks
The building blocks of a VPD based PoC solution.
As a proof-of-concept initiative, TCS implemented a RISC-V based VPD environment to demonstrate virtual system integration and testing feasibility.
RISC-V Model
The open-source RISC-V ISA supports configurable multi-core architecture with 32/64-bit address capability. The RV64GC variant was selected and integrated with key components using an AXI bus, running a lightweight Linux OS.
OVPSim Simulator
Imperas OVPSim was used as a type-2 hypervisor simulator, capable of running virtual machine-equivalent models with high performance and support for heterogeneous multiprocessor architectures.
Data and file transfer applications
Two applications were developed to demonstrate host-guest interaction:
- Socket-based data transfer application supporting Windows/Linux in client-server mode.
- Linux-based file transfer application enabling text file exchange using BSD sockets.
These applications successfully demonstrated communication and performance monitoring between the host and the guest virtual environment.
Relevance & Conclusion
The relevance of VPD platform to the semiconductor industry.
The PoC validated the feasibility and performance benefits of parallel hardware-software development, early testing and virtualized prototyping, demonstrating clear business value for semiconductor manufacturers.
The conventional semiconductor development cycle is unsustainable amid rising complexity and shrinking time-to-market expectations. Virtual prototype development has become essential in enabling faster product cycles, reduced costs and superior design outcomes.
Global standardization of VPD will accelerate adoption, foster collaboration across the semiconductor ecosystem and drive future innovation. By implementing VPD, organizations can achieve up to 50% reduction in tape-out duration compared to traditional methods, significantly improving competitiveness.
VPD is not just an option—it is a strategic imperative for the future of semiconductor development.