【正文】 details to be tested without the real target platform, design time and cost can be greatly reduced. Especially, for educational institutions where a sufficient number of embedded equipments are not deployed, this type of target specific virtual platform will be greatly helpful to teach students how to design a target specific embedded system while minimally requiring the time to use the real hardware. Our Virtual ARM Platform implementation is based on ARM Authorized licensed use limited to: Zhengzhou University. Downloaded on February 25, 2020 at 05:15 from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply. 587simulations by using SimItARM simulator [3] and Graphic User Interface by using QT library [4]. Also to extend the target specific capability with ease, we have designed an emulator which automatically produces platformspecific environment settings from the given platformspecific information for easy maintenance and adjustment. Furthermore, we have implemented a timer interrupt handler for simple simulation. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we discuss how it is different to utilize Virtual ARM Platform from traditional ways of developing embedded system. In Section 3, we summarize some of closely related existing studies. Section 4 presents how our proposed Virtual ARM Platform is organized and how it works. In Section 5, we present experimental results. Section 6 will conclude this paper. 2. Needs for virtual ARM platform . Development of embedded system S/W It is widely known that there is a significant difference between developing software for general puting platform such as PC and developing software for embedded system. Therefore, software developers for general platforms tend to have many difficulties in developing embedded software because embedded system software development additionally requires the generated executable program to be downloaded on the target embedded system to examine its execution. This means that the software development environment (typically PCs) and the software execution environment (the target embedded platform) of embedded system are not same, while general software has the same development and execution environment (both PCs). Figure 1 shows the general development and test procedure of embedded system software. While PC software only needs PC in every stage of its development, embedded software essentially needs to execute on real embedded system hardware. For those who are not familiar with embedded software equipment, testing their software on a real hardware platform is a challenging job. They should learn about overall embedded system, and must be adept in using Figure 1. Development of embedded system software hardware and downloading programs on hardware. Also, if they cannot afford to have enough (often highly expensive) embedded equipment, their opportunity to test their software on the real target platform will be severely limited. To overe such a problem, we have designed Virtual ARM Platform, which offers easier testing and debugging environment to ARM based embedded system developers. . Usage of virtual ARM platform Virtual ARM Platform enables to observe the execution result of embedded software as if they are downloaded and executed on a real hardware ARM Platform. Developers can write program codes, build executable files, and verify their programs by using Virtual ARM Platform in the development host (PC). Since it doesn’t need any hardware but PC, there is no downloading stage in developing procedure. Figure 2 shows the procedure of embedded system development when using Virtual ARM Platform. Figure 2. Development of Embedded System Software Using Virtual ARM Platform Authorized licensed use limited to: Zhengzhou University. Downloaded on February 25, 2020 at 05:15 from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply. 588 Figure 3. Execution of Firmwa