Before a real tar­get hard­ware is avail­able, start­ing develop­ment and ini­tial inte­gra­tion work with vir­tu­al hard­ware makes sense. The increas­ing com­plex­i­ty of embed­ded soft­ware in gen­er­al, time-to-mar­ket, and the early setup of test automa­tion jus­ti­fy using such vir­tu­al hard­ware also called Vir­tu­al Tar­get or Vir­tu­al Pro­to­type.

Level 4 Vir­tu­al ECUs such as Syn­op­sys VDK enables you to run tar­get com­piled auto­mo­tive soft­ware. This means that the same appli­ca­tion can be exe­cut­ed first on the vir­tu­al ECU and later on tar­get hard­ware once it becomes avail­able, allow­ing for a smooth tran­si­tion.

winIDEA sup­ports Syn­op­sys VDK and offers the same front-end and func­tion­al­i­ty used for on-tar­get soft­ware develop­ment, debug­ging, test­ing, and trace analy­sis. As soon as tar­get hard­ware is avail­able, sim­ply switch to it with a mouse click and con­tin­ue work­ing in the envi­ron­ment you are already used to.

Like­wise, winIDEA SDK pro­vides the same inter­faces - a Con­tin­u­ous Inte­gra­tion automa­tion script can be used with­out change on both the real and vir­tu­al ECU.