1. Purpose and scope
Until a product built from it works in silicon, a platform is a promise. The lead product turns it into evidence. It is a real product with its own customers, built through its own SoC, firmware and product lifecycles, but from the platform's point of view it is also the platform's most important test: the first time the reference architecture, the reusable IP, the software platform, the SDK and the reference board design are used together on real hardware.
Two jobs run side by side. The lead product team validates its product; the platform team watches for anything that is a platform issue rather than a product issue, fixes it in the platform or records it as errata, and confirms that the platform technology the lead product proved is ready to be frozen. Correlation between prototype and silicon results tells the platform team how far prototypes can be trusted for the derivatives that follow.
In scope: lead product hardware, firmware and software on silicon, the lead product validation report, the prototype to silicon correlation report, the platform software release candidate, the final boot and firmware images, and the architecture change log of lessons fed back to the platform. Out of scope: the lead product's own tape-out, qualification and production release, which belong to its SoC and Product lifecycles, and the released platform baseline, which is issued in the next stage.
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