1. Purpose of the gate
The virtual platform shows the software works against a model. Emulation and FPGA prototypes show it works against the actual design, at a speed high enough to boot operating environments, run real use cases and find the hardware issues only software finds. For a platform the stakes are higher than for one chip: an issue in the common hardware reaches every derivative, so it is far cheaper to find it here than in the lead product's silicon.
The gate criteria are: platform software on prototypes boots and runs the planned use cases on the prototypes; the conformance test suite passes on the prototypes; and hardware issues found by software are fixed or tracked.
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