The eval board is dead.It just hasn't shipped yet.
You ship a dev board in five days. Your competitor's part is already inside the AI agent's context window — compiled, running, and passing tests. VirtMCU is a virtual distribution channel for the hour that now belongs to a machine: the first hour of every evaluation, the one nobody at your company has ever been able to see.
Figure 1: VirtMCU Cloud Simulation Workbench — Instruction-accurate virtual MCU executing production firmware with register-level MMR inspection, bus co-simulation, and automated test assertion.
The channel you spend the most on is the one you cannot see.
Every evaluation of your MCU begins the same way: a board leaves a warehouse and vanishes. You don't know whether it was unboxed. You don't know which peripheral the engineer gave up on, or on which register. You don't know what part they chose instead, or why.
You paid for the silicon, the assembly, the fulfillment, the customs form, and the desk drawer it is currently sitting in. What you did not buy is a single bit of information.
Firmware is being written by agents. Agents take the path of least resistance.
If an agent can pull your part, compile against it, execute it, and verify the result without a human plugging anything in, it will use your part. If your part requires a human, a board, and a week of waiting, the agent routes around you — silently, and before anyone in your sales org knows the opportunity existed.
You don't have to believe an agent will buy your chip. You only have to believe the first hour of the evaluation now belongs to a machine. Being present in that hour requires zero engineering overhead from your team. Being absent costs the design-in.
An instruction-accurate model of your MCU, served to the agent directly.
VirtMCU is a deterministic simulator for your microcontroller, delivered over MCP — the protocol AI coding agents already speak. The agent discovers your part, writes firmware for it, executes it against a faithful model of your core and peripherals, reads back real register state, and iterates until the tests pass. No board. No bench. No shipping. No waiting.
The Semiconductor Partnership Program puts your hardware at the center of the modern AI developer workflow: we model and validate your silicon, placing it directly into the VirtMCU cloud catalog and MCP server. Developers and AI coding agents evaluate your chips immediately with zero setup friction.
| Channel Parameter | Sym | Physical Eval Board | VirtMCU Virtual Silicon | Vendor Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Time to first running firmware | t_fw | Days to weeks | < 1 second | Zero drop-off |
| AI coding agent accessibility | A_ai | Not accessible | Native MCP protocol | Default choice |
| Evaluation friction & wiring | F_eval | Manual cables, power, probes | Instant cloud boot | Frictionless |
| Channel visibility & telemetry | V_chan | Dark (zero data returned) | Full execution trace | Design-in telemetry |
| Peripheral stall diagnostics | D_stall | Unknown | Exact register sequence | Erratum feedback |
| Silicon bring-up burden for vendor | B_vend | Board design, assembly, stock | 0 vendor hours | Zero overhead |
| Global logistics & stockout risk | L_risk | Shortages, customs, tariffs | Infinite availability | Day-one global |
| Lost opportunity recovery | R_opp | Impossible | Actionable re-engagement | Closed loop |
Note 1: Physical figures reflect logistics, fulfillment, customs duty, and manual bench wiring overhead.
Note 2: VirtMCU virtual silicon models support multi-node bus networks (CAN-FD, TSN Ethernet, Thread/Matter) out of the box with bit-identical determinism.
We are not selling you a mailing list. We are selling you a telescope.
Because the evaluation now happens on instrumented infrastructure instead of on a desk you cannot see, the channel stops being dark. For the first time:
- Which of your parts get evaluated — and which get abandoned mid-evaluation.
- Which peripheral the agent stalls on. The exact block. The exact register sequence.
- Which documentation gaps and errata are costing you design-ins, ranked by frequency.
- Which competing part the workload moved to when yours didn't work.
No board has ever reported any of this back to you, because boards don't report. This is the asset. The virtual catalog is how we acquire it.
Opt-in and aggregate by design. We report design-in intelligence to you — not surveillance of individual developers.
We need your reference manual. Nothing behind it.
Models are built from your public reference manual, CMSIS-SVD, and datasheet. No RTL. No netlist. No test vectors. No confidential design data changes hands, and none is required. Your team is welcome to review the finished model and certify it — the same status you would grant a third-party BSP. If there is a block you would rather we not model, we don't model it.
How we partner. Zero engineering overhead from your team.
Model Bring-Up
You send public reference manuals and SVD files. Refract Systems builds and independently validates the instruction-accurate model against golden RTOS tests.
Catalog Activation
Your part goes live in the VirtMCU cloud catalog and MCP server. AI coding agents and embedded developers worldwide can evaluate your silicon in seconds.
Design-In Intelligence
You receive closed-loop telemetry: real-time evaluation volume, peripheral usage, exact register stall sequences, and competitive migration patterns.
— a single hour of your engineers' time
— proprietary RTL or confidential IP disclosure
— custom hardware allocations or procurement cycles
When an agent or developer is ready to buy production silicon, we route them straight to your authorized distributors and web storefront. We don't sit in the transaction.
Name one part. We'll bring it up before you commit to anything.
Pick a single MCU — ideally one you're actively promoting or launching. We will model it and send you a recording of an AI agent writing, compiling, running, and validating firmware on it, start to finish, unattended, with no human touching a keyboard. Reach out to start a pilot.
support@refractsystems.com · virtmcu.com · refractsystems.com