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Welcome to the Open Virtual Platforms (OVP) portal

Welcome to one of the most exciting open source software developments in the embedded software world since GNU created GDB. OVP: Fast Simulation, Free open source models, Public APIs: Open Virtual Platforms.

If you are developing embedded software then virtual platforms will be increasingly important to you - especially if you are working on designs with more than one processor - then this portal will become an important resource for you.

Please do take the time to browse the different pages and come back and visit as we add more information, technology, documents, and very importantly make sure you go to the download area and take a look at all the different capabilities and models being offered for free by this community. Download one of the simpler platforms into your PC and see how your embedded software development environment can run 100s of MIPS, often faster than real time.

We announced OVP in March 2008 and have since put the OVPsim simulator, full documentation, and examples / demos and processor models on this site - ARM, MIPS, ARC, NEC v850, openCores OR1K, PowerPC, homogeneous, heterogeneous, single core, multicore, manycore, C, C++, SystemC, TLM2.0 etc. We have now put some of the processor and peripheral models into open source and made them available on this site via the library pages - please start to use the simulator and modeling technology with the existing models and keep coming back and have a look at our progress. If you want to help out - please email us.

To read about the rationale behind OVP please go here. To learn about the technology go here.

What is OVP? - It is simulation to develop software on: Fast Simulation, Free open source models, Easy to use!

Imperas developed some fantastic virtual platform and modeling technology to enable simulating embedded systems running real application code. These simulations run at speeds of 100s and 100s of MIPS on typical desktop PCs and are completely Instruction Accurate and model the whole system.

Imperas decided to open up this technology and OVP is the vehicle to make it public.

OVP has three main components - the OVP APIs that enable a C model to be written, a collection of free open source processor and peripheral models, and OVPsim a fast, easy to download and use simulator that executes these models.

With OVP you can put together a simulation model of a platform, compile it to an executable, and connect it to your debugger to provide a very efficient fast embedded software development environment.

There are many companies and organizations getting involved with OVP - the ecosystem is starting...