Electronic Design Automation (EDA) companies provides tools to develop, design, simulate, verify and test electronic designs. There are EDA tools for every design process step and for every type of electronic design. This includes design entry, simulation, test, yield and reliability tools and system level, logic, analog, mixed signal, sensor and transistor based electronic designs.
For very large system designs, there are system level design tools. These tools allow the the designer to model software, hardware and firmware at the same time and determine how these blocks interact within a proposed design. In system design. high level models of software, firmware and hardware are used.
Once the system design is verified, the is the software and hardware models produce the intended system level results, the models and interconnecting links are compiled into two separate files, a hardware file and a software file. The hardware file is used to manufacture the system’s hardware components and the compiled software, is used as the application software that will eventually be run on the hardware. After the hardware is manufactured, the system is tested with the applications software to see if the application software executes on the electronics hardware as the system level simulator predicted.