Dec 21
2022
When deploying consumer-facing products which process multi-sensor data in the field it’s almost impossible to predict all possible scenarios. But massively scalable, reliable and deterministic testing in simulation can get you much closer to that ideal state. The open source Renode framework enables unprecedented levels of automated testing for hardware products, both in development and throughout the product’s lifecycle, by providing determinism and running production binaries just like on the target hardware. Renode supports hundreds of embedded platforms and comes with a range of developer-oriented features such as state saving and replaying, advanced hooks and events, comprehensive tracing, multi-core debugging, etc. Read more
Nov 24
2022
As part of the effort to introduce open source tools and building blocks to ASIC development, together with other CHIPS Alliance members, Antmicro has been supporting the Multi-Project-Wafer (MPW) shuttle program, using the first open source 130nm PDK run by efabless, Google and SkyWater Technology Foundry. Making open tooling for pre-silicon testing and verification broadly available has significant potential for mitigating difficulties in the ASIC design of post-Moore’s Law age. In yet another push towards this direction, Antmicro has introduced an MPW design tester template for Renode, our open source simulation framework, targeted at open MPW shuttle submission projects. Read more
Nov 14
2022
Antmicro’s open source Renode simulation framework offers support for the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) protocol and multi-node simulation capabilities, which makes it a great environment for development, debugging and testing of local area radio networks, such as IoT consumer devices, smart home applications or multi-sensor telemetry systems. On top of device-level debugging through virtual machine code execution, Renode features probabilistic packets loss simulation, global network state analysis and, perhaps most notably in this case, automated testing of various network configurations with the Robot Framework. Read more
Oct 26
2022
The latest version of Antmicro’s open source simulation framework, Renode 1.13 was released some months ago, bringing a variety of improvements all across the board. Since then, there have been even more updates in the form of 1.13.1 and 1.13.2, reflecting the rapid development of the framework. One of the most significant changes for the long term development of Renode, but perhaps less prominently discussed so far while the work was underway, is introducing support for the .NET 6 runtime, alongside the original Mono framework that Renode was built around. Read more
Oct 4
2022
Tracing software execution on real hardware can be challenging, as to access the internal state of the components and the software itself you often need to attach specialized debugging hardware or instrument the source code. Since additional hardware can throw off the timing of events and desynchronize the whole system, and instrumented software may not always be able to use the highest level of compiler optimization, the gathered information may not be the same as for the normal binary. Read more