Preliminaries

This section gives an overview over the common topics the following chapters build upon to keep this book self-contained. Individual, per-chapter specific topics (such as security lattices, Section 4.3) will however be introduced in their respective subsections. As the proposed advanced design flow is focused on embedded devices (ranging from simple microcontrollers to huge SoCs), the concept of embedded devices and how they are usually laid out is explained first. The development of such devices is nowadays aided with VPs, so the status quo of virtual prototyping with a focus on modeling with SystemC and TLM in particular is explained, and the trade-off between simulation accuracy and execution speed is introduced. Lastly, a summary and the rationale of the RISC-V ISA and its ecosystem, which is used as a functional case-study in this book, are outlined.