Electronic systems manufacturers are under tremendous pressure to rapidly deliver competitive
products to market. Product development lifecycles have shrunk enormously and this has forced
product engineering to be innovative. One recent approach borrowed from the manufacturing
world has been the use of a platform-based approach to the hardware and the software. A fully
integrated platform approach to product design allows manufacturers to create better, full-featured,
lower-cost devices.
Such devices are completely configurable in that the graphical user interface and the behavior of the
applications completely changes depending on a set of inputs provided. Such systems pose unique
challenges to the product development especially from a verification and validation perspective.